The summer school holidays can be hard on the “House-Proud” – those people who love everything to be neat and tidy. As the adage goes, “everything has a place and everything in its place”.
But when you’ve got kids home from school for weeks on end, and the doors and windows open to trap a cool breeze of relief from the summer heat, it’s a real challenge to keep your home pristine.
Whether you’re living in an apartment or house, there’s always potential for identifying unwanted and unused possessions that take up precious space in your home.
Regularly applying a discipline of decluttering is a great strategy for ensuring your home stays organised, and everyone enjoys living in it. It will also minimise your work when it’s time to sell.
So, below, our agents have put together a list of tips to help you instill a decluttering mentality for 2025 and beyond. We hope you find our ideas useful.
Create a Schedule: Put a regular time aside to focus on different parts of your home. Consider setting up once-a-month tasks to focus on the living area, and then the following week the bathroom cabinets, and then the bedrooms.
Ease your workload: Don’t try to do everything at once. Decluttering an entire apartment or house is a major task. And instead of maintaining a tidy environment, you might only manage to get the job done once or twice a year.
Problem Pockets: Identify areas that seem to attract junk, or where some items have a use-by data. The fridge is an obvious target, but you shouldn’t forget the medicine cabinet. And it’s amazing how the nooks and crannies of your home are a magnet.
Unwanted Bin: Put aside a bin or area where you can put unwanted items. This encourages everyone in the household to take responsibility for their own stuff. It also makes “council clean-up day” a breeze to prepare for.
Clear Surfaces: There’s always an area in the home that attracts handbags, car keys, school bags and the like. We just go through the front door and dump what we’re carrying. Encourage the household to stop that behaviour. If you keep surfaces clear consistently, you’ll be amazed at what happens.
Doubling Up: Take a look in the kitchen drawers and see how many wooden spoons you have. If it’s more than one, ask why you need the other. And do this with everything else in the home. Why do you need multiples of anything if one will do?
Disposing Strategy: It’s fine to declutter, but what do you do with all the unwanted stuff? We suggest offering it to friends, or taking it to a charity shop, and only throwing unloved items away as a last resort.