Over the last few months, we've been trying to spend some time re-organising our living environment.
Now I have to admit, minimalism is not something that comes naturally to my family & I - and we know that we will never be true minimalists, nor do we really want to be. We're a family of five who home educate and we just have to accept that means that we need a lot of "stuff" - from home education resources and lots of art supplies, to endless books and probably more toys than the average family (given that our children spend a lot more time at home than the average child would!) - so for the foreseeable future, there is going to be a lot of "clutter" to deal with.
But we wanted to try to get things a bit more streamlined and organised.
Here are some of the ways we managed to get more organised and clutter-free in our busy family home.
1) Seek Storage Outside Of The Home
When going through the items in our home, we soon realised that a lot of our storage space was taken up by items that we really only need to have access to once a year - we had the entire hall cupboard taken up with Christmas decorations, and our loft space was dominated by our Halloween and Easter decor too.
We decided to look into how much it would cost us to hire a small storage unit locally to keep these items in, and were pleasantly surprised at how affordable it was and how easy it was to sort out. For example, Now Storage self storage in Newent offer online quotations and some really great prices.We decided that the space we gained back was worth the cost to us, and this has made such a difference to the overall space available in our home.
2) Utilise All Available Storage Space
Another thing we realised was that there was lots of storage space in our home that we were wasting. For example, we have an outside lavatory which we simply never use at all but it was lying completely empty - we've now started to use this space to store all of our pet cleaning supplies, which has freed up space within our basement for other items.
3) Make Use Of Wall Space
Now this one may not really count as reducing clutter, but I did find it really helpful to start utilising wall space for storage and display of some of the childrens toys.
My daughter has a pretty large collection of Disney cuddlies which were previously kept in numerous difference places including her bed, hanging storage baskets and various toy boxes around the house. So we put up some picture shelves around her bedroom and displayed her cuddly collection there - this means that not only are they now out of the way and not cluttering up multiple rooms, but they're also nicely displayed for her to enjoy too. Ideal!
4) Use Vac-Bags
One big cause of clutter in our house is fancy dress costumes! My children are all absolutely obsessed with fancy dress costumes and they are by far the things that they play with most often, usually changing outfits several times every day. They have hundreds of different costumes, and I don't want to complain about this or force them to downsize because they genuinely do use and enjoy them all - but I was having a really difficult time with storing them.
We've now started to use vac-bags which enables us to fit far more costumes into our dress up boxes - we label the bags with which costumes are inside so that we don't need to go through every vac-bag when they're looking for a certain one, and it makes life so much easier.
5) Make Use Of Floor Space With Raised Beds
We realised that we were losing a lot of potential storage space by having beds with bases on the ground, so we changed things up a bit.
My son has a cabin bed which means we can use the underneath for storing his toys, keeping them out of sight with a curtain around the base of the bed. We decided to save on more space by using bunk beds for our youngest two children, freeing up more floor space within their bedrooms.
We then replaced our bed with a new one that lifts up to provide under bed storage, giving us an ideal place to store suitcases and out-of-season clothes.
Do you have any tips to share for organising a busy family home?
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