Keep It or Bin It: Knowing When to Let Go of Your Things

• March 27, 2015
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• Posted in : Decluttering

We all have too much stuff. Some of that stuff is radically improving our lives, either by adding beauty to our home or making our daily habits more efficient. But the other stuff is just weighing us down.

Luckily, there are lots of alternatives to storing everything in our homes, but we still have to decide what to keep and what to bin. It can be hard to differentiate between what is useful and what is only adding clutter to our homes. Here’s how to approach decluttering:

Toss Broken Items

This is the easiest part – even though it might not feel like it. If you’ve been hanging onto something telling yourself that you’ll get it fixed one day, it’s time to realise that one day will never come. If it were urgent, you would have fixed it already. Turns out, your life continued without ever needing that item, and hanging onto it is only adding an unnecessary task to a to-do list that’s probably already too long anyway.

Don’t Let Sentiment Cloud Your Decision Making

Some sentimental things you will want to hold onto forever – like your child’s first outfit – but others you don’t need. When going through items that hold sentimental value, see if you really need the item to remind you of a special time in your life or if you already remember anyway. Most of the sentimental items we hold on to live in a box that we only visit once or twice a year. Consider taking photos of the items and storing them on your hard drive instead of in your home. Alternatively, you can also store the hard to part with but not terribly useful items in a storage unit outside of your home.

Everything Needs a Home

The way to avoid clutter in your home is to make sure that everything you own has a specific place where it’s kept. There’s a cabinet for glasses, a cupboard for shoes, a place where you hang your keys etc. An easy way to figure out whether something should be tossed or kept is to see if there is a logical place for it in your home. Do you have to dedicate a drawer to things that can’t go anywhere else? That drawer is the island of misfit toys in your house, and all of its contents can probably be tossed. Chances you even avoid opening it unless you’re adding another orphan item to the pile. Clear the space in your home and your mind by binning the content.

Will You Need the Item Later?

There are many reasons why you might not need something right now: it’s the wrong season (you don’t need a snow blower in the middle of summer); you want to try living with less; you’re going abroad for a few months or years. These are things you will need later, but you have no use or space for them in this period of your life. These items can go into storage until you need them. With our domestic storage, we deliver a storage container to your house, pick it up once it’s packed, and then return it whenever you need it again.