If you are really trying to declutter your home and getting rid of a lot of stuff, try starting by giving each room a purpose! This means labeling a room as its purpose and giving a dedicated home to those purposeful things in that room.
There are so many great reasons to create a purpose for each room. Overall, though, it lessens decision fatigue because if an item doesn’t suit the purpose of the room, it doesn’t belong in the home!
Makes for quicker tidying
Stream line the tidying with purposeful rooms. Either get a basket for each room or make piles to sort the stuff for each room. Categorizing and putting things into piles can be very helpful only if you fully deal with each pile. If any of the pile is left, then you still have more work to do!
The house becomes easier to live in.
After figuring out the purpose for each room, then you know how to use each room or at least what the space is meant for. It becomes easier to pull out things to do because you know where it makes the most sense to do that activity. A playroom for setting up a fort, for example, or the kitchen for baking.
It gives your cleaning a purpose rather than quickly stashing things in any old hiding place you can find.
It also makes it way easier for everyone in the house to work together! If everyone knows the purpose of each space, they can help sort out what goes where. Sometimes, it can be hard to remember where something goes if there’s a bit of this here and there as opposed to having only one defined spot where it belongs! Think of classroom organization. In a kindergarten room, you wouldn’t find a picture of markers on a tub on a desk, and on a shelf, and by the teacher’s desk, and by the front door, and on the window ledge! There’s likely just one bin with a marker label so that all the markers go there, to that one spot. It’s really easy for everyone to find that one spot where they go. It makes it really easy to tidy up! The same can happen at home. If you have a room that you typically sit in with friends or family and have coffee together, it makes sense maybe to keep the coasters in there as well. If you have the coasters in the kitchen, you may forget to pull them out because they are not in a logical place for the purpose of the kitchen. If the purpose of the room is to sit with a hot coffee or tea, make it easy to use the space for that!
It makes your shopping decisions easier
Think about it! If you don’t have a home gym, seeing that set of weights on sale or a fitness motivational poster for half price, it might not make sense to buy them, even on sale!! If you don’t have a gaming room, you likely don’t need a specific gaming table – think board games and puzzles. It is more likely that you will set up the game on the dining table. You also likely won’t need any gaming room decor! So it will be easier to help yourself make buying decisions when each room in your home has a purpose! If the item you want to buy serves a purpose in a certain room, sure, if not, then don’t buy it!
You probably naturally have a certain purpose in mind for each room in your home. You may not even realize how definitive those purposes are until you start to label them. Even if your rooms are connected, you likely have a purpose for this half and a different purpose for the other half. If you can zone in and get really specific about what each room is used for, it becomes really easy to know what you can store where. It might make sense to place your board games on a shelf close to the dining room (where you will actually be playing those games).
If you stick with defined purposes, it will become very black and white about what belongs! When you have a multipurpose space, it can seem cluttered and unappealing to be in that space! It might seem great to have a room with multipurposes, but it often is hard to maintain it!
The key is to really define the purpose. The clearer the purpose, the easier it will be to stick with good home habits and maintain the space.
As always, good luck with your decluttering adventure! May you always see your floor and not step on Lego!
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