Knowing how to declutter your home is a practice as old as homes themselves. For as long as we’ve been gathering material things around us in one set place, humans have faced the challenge of how to organise them in such a way that they don’t spoil the space we’ve come to call our home.
Traditionally, an annual ‘spring clean’ was all that was needed to ensure homes remained tidy and clutter free. Yet, as we all grow older, have families, and merge the possessions of several people, over several decades, under one roof—especially in our era of heightened materialism—this tradition alone becomes insufficient to controlling the clutter.
Recent viral trends and popular movements—such as the one kick-started by Mari Kondo’s book on extreme decluttering, Spark Joy—have promoted a pretty ruthless approach to keeping your house clutter-free. Though the ‘Konmari’ method of decluttering has undoubtedly worked wonders for many, it’s certainly not for everyone. Indeed, the thought of getting rid of anything in your home that doesn’t ‘spark joy’ can be distressing, and the practice, if adhered to, can render your house a characterless, minimalist space, which no longer feels like home.
Thankfully, decluttering your home doesn’t have to mean getting rid of everything you own and never buying anything new ever again. It doesn’t have to mean creating a whitewashed, minimalist space that looks more like an art gallery than a house. And it most definitely doesn’t have to be stressful, either.
In this Evelyn Lily guide to decluttering your home for UK homeowners and renters, you’ll uncover a handful of really effective, really simple, and often enjoyable methods for tidying your house and keeping it free of clutter for the long run.
Why declutter your home in the first place?
First things first, why even bother with our decluttering tips for homes and houses in the UK? Well, for lots of reasons.
Clutter negatively affects your mental health
Did you know that, in 2019, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) published a study proving that cluttered homes and workspaces actually damage your mental health? Basically, our brains like order and structure, so when we exist in a messy, cluttered and disorganised space, we tend to become more anxious, depressed, and stressed out. Visible clutter can even reduce the effectiveness of our memory! Knowing this, it becomes immediately clear just how beneficial decluttering your home can be.
No more lost items or lost time spent searching for them
Decluttering, as you’ll soon find out, isn’t just about getting rid of material items. It’s equally about learning how to better store and organise the things you choose to keep. By putting clear and memorable storage systems in place—and sticking to them—you’ll be able to find whatever it is you’re looking for with ease. No more losing things amongst the chaos!
Once you declutter, keeping your home tidy becomes much easier
Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that decluttering your home is much more than just a one-time payoff. A good declutter can last a lifetime, by ensuring future ‘spring cleans’ take less time and are less stressful to carry out. In short, with less stuff to clean and organise, keeping your home tidy is a breeze.
Decluttering tips for homes in the UK: 6 solutions to help organise every room
British homes tend to be older builds, sometimes kept in the family for generations, meaning there could be generations’ worth of stuff cluttering up your personal space.
Older houses in the UK can also be unique in the spaces they offer for storage (and, for that matter, for clutter!), whilst newer builds and smaller homes like flats tend to have very little built-in storage space at all – see our new build living room guide for all the nitty gritty details.
The tips described below have been carefully collected and curated to show anyone living in the UK how to declutter their home in as little as a single weekend, using time-proven organisational methods, which needn’t cause any stress.
The first step in tidying your home: Decluttering
We’ve broken our top tips up into two main sections: decluttering and organising. You should declutter first to make the organisation as easy as possible.
Decluttering tip #1: Declutter by category, instead of by room
It might sound counterintuitive—after all, your bedroom’s bound to be more cluttered than your conservatory—but we recommend decluttering by category, not by room.
By approaching The Great Declutter by category, you can make the overall project much more manageable and less stressful. For example, we’d suggest focusing on categories (and breaking these down into subcategories if you like) such as:
- Clothes
- Underwear
- Tops
- Bottoms
- Sportswear
- Outdoor wear
- Physical media
- Books
- CDs/records
- DVDs/Blu-ray
- Toys
- Board games
- Kids toys by child
- Hobby paraphernalia
- Miscellaneous
- Papers/documents/receipts
- Trinkets
- Sentimental keepsakes
- Souvenirs, etc.
By working through your chosen categories and subcategories of stuff like so, you can do a really focused sweep of the entire house per type-of-item, and at the end of the process, have left no nook nor cranny untouched!
Lastly, once the category decluttering is done with, you can turn to those few remaining room-specific items, such as kitchenware (pots, pans, cutlery, Tupperware), bathroom accessories, and all the random things you keep in/on your bedside table!
Decluttering tip #2: Create a hierarchy of declutter destinations
It’s important when decluttering to have a system in place for disposing (or keeping) items. This means that as you pick up and consider each individual thing, you can then place it in a designated bag or box or place set aside for a specific destination.
For example, when getting rid of clutter, you could put discarded items in boxes labelled like so:
- Donation to charity
- Donation to a friend or family member (e.g., passing down old baby clothes)
- Waste
- Recycle
- Resale
Similarly, when choosing to keep an item, you can put each piece aside either for display or storage.
By organising your ‘declutter destinations’ like this, it makes the process of getting rid of your items not only physically easier, but mentally easier too (knowing that an old beloved dress or children’s toy is going to find a new home and help make money for charity can make parting with the possession much less stressful).
Decluttering tip #3: Sensible sentimentality versus silly sentimentality
Sentimental value can take many forms, and is without a doubt the biggest spanner-in-the-works of any decluttering project. If we try hard enough, we can often find a sentimental reason to keep just about everything we own—meaning any attempt to declutter our home is defeated before it even begins!
That’s why we’d recommend defining, for yourself, ‘silly’ sentimentality versus ‘sensible’ sentimentality.
For example, you could decide that it would be silly to keep anything that, although sentimentally valuable, you haven’t actually looked at in the past few years. That means all those old clothes, CDs, games, VHS videos (I mean, can you even play them anymore?) hidden in boxes in the attic, can go. It would be silly to keep them—especially when you can replace them fairly easily if you choose to in future.
On the other hand, you could decide that it is sensible to keep anything sentimental that you can’t easily replace, and you interact with relatively often. Inherited possessions, family photographs, souvenirs that remind you of past adventures—anything with memorable stories attached, and you like having on display.
By establishing a hard and fast rule regulating your sentimentality, you will soon find it much easier to reduce the amount of clutter around your home.
Decluttering tip #4: Take your time and conserve your energy
Most important of all is this final decluttering tip for your home: take your time! Don’t pressure yourself to get everything done in an afternoon, or a day, a weekend or even an entire week. Depending on the amount of clutter in your home, the process can (and should) take time.
So, be kind to yourself: give yourself plenty of free time to tidy, sort and declutter, take breaks when you get tired, remember to stop for lunch and plenty of cuppas, and most of all, remember to congratulate yourself each time you tick off another clutter category!
The second step in tidying your home: Organising
With the decluttering done, and your unwanted, excess and unused items off to the charity shop, menders or rubbish tip, it’s time to reorganise your home for long-lasting tidiness. Organisation is about preventing future build-up of clutter as much as it is about maintaining the new, clear, clean and welcoming house you’ve unlocked.
Organisation tip #1: Think about how to rearrange each room for better storage
With your clutter donated to charity, resold online (Facebook Marketplace is a great place to start!), and dropped off at your local recycling centre, it’s time to think about how each room in your home can facilitate better organisation and storage in future. Below are listed a few ideas to help you get started:
- Consider how a different layout of furniture might make the room feel more open and less cluttered in the first place. This may help encourage you to keep it clutter-free in the long run.
- Keep an eye out for convenient storage units you can purchase to give rooms, hallways and corners a much-needed extra bit of space. For example, slender shoe cabinets in hallways can blend in nicely with your existing interior design whilst neatly tucking away dozens of pairs of unsightly soles! Likewise, sideboards can serve a similar purpose in dining rooms, helping to take care of the overspill from your kitchen’s crockery cupboards.
- Consider creating useful, accessible and sensible spaces for specific categories of items (like a box specifically for tech, batteries and chargers, or a folder for instruction manuals; specific drawers for different types of clothes, and different bookshelves for books you’ve read versus books you’re still to read). Not only does this keep your misc. clutter out of sight, but it also makes it easier to locate and store these items in future.
Organisation tip #2: Rethink your approach to buying new things
Lastly, it’s worth noting the importance of changing our approach to buying. According to WRAP, Brits currently have over 1.6 billion items of clothing sitting unused in their collective wardrobe. This staggering statistic represents a much wider issue of overconsumption, leading directly to a build-up of clutter in our homes.
If we learn to approach buying with greater intention—for example, buying quality, long-lasting items, less often, than frequently purchasing low-quality items that don’t last—we can not only reduce waste on a nationwide scale, but keep our homes tidier too.
Wrapping Up On Home Decluttering
Decluttering your home isn’t about getting rid of everything in sight, nor changing the way your home ultimately looks or feels. Instead, it’s about sorting the stuff you own in a meaningful way to ensure you keep the things most useful, frequently used, and important to you, while discarding the ones that can find themselves a better home elsewhere.
By following the decluttering solutions we’ve outlined in this article, even the biggest, oldest, and most cluttered of UK homes can be transformed into relaxing, clutter-free spaces in a carefully considered way, without adding to your stress. For further effective methods for elevating your interior design and home living, explore more from the Evelyn Lily Interiors blog today.
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