Decluttering Our Home – The Blessed Girl with an Extra Storage Space

I thank God for all the blessing I receive and this one included.

There is an extra storage cabinet that’s built in to the wall of my unit. We’re talking about floor to ceiling, 5 tiered cabinet, 150cm length 50cm depth. Just what I need!

Now, this storage has been my ultimate messy corner. So, I’ve decided to take control of it from now on.

After taking out everything in it and laying them on the floor (to my cat’s amazement – he’s clearly not impressed by my hoarding behavior), I grouped the items together and here’s what I came up with:

1. I have too many manchesters – so I kept only 4 sets of bed sheets, pillow cases, and quilt covers
2. I hoard towels – now I kept only 6 towels (my husband and I change towels every week)
3. I have no system whatsoever for my electrical related tools - we bought one of those tool boxes.
4. I clearly haven’t been cleaning this section for some time; we found one box full of unused cables, PC installation CDs, old phone sockets, and more. All of these gone now.
5. I have too much random stuff, such as key rings, stationery, old keys, pieces of paper, cosmetic bags, etc. Seriously, I don’t know how I acquired these things… 

After a full day of work, my storage cabinet is looking great. I managed to empty 2 tiers. One of them is currently used to store large kitchen equipments (mixers, huge cake containers, boxes of serving plates, etc) and I have kept 1 tier empty for now, which is amazing. I’ve also managed to put space bags of winter clothes on the top tier of the storage.

Decluttering Our Home – The Girl with a Full Wardrobe

So the New Year had come, it’s time again to review the state of our home.

I try to do this cleanup every 3 months, and do a major one at the beginning of the year. From looking at the front of my neighbor’s houses, I have a feeling I’m not the only one. Luckily, the state of mine wasn’t really bad.

I do have a New Year’s resolution to slim down my wardrobe. So, that’s the first thing that I do. It seemed like an easy win at that time. But it’s not! I thought the more stuff you have, the more stuff you can throw out. I was so wrong…

I decided to come up with list of items and numbers, just to give an example: 10 casual tops, 10 formal tops, 15 formal dresses, 1 pair of shoes (LOL! Just joking!), make that 5 pair of heels, and 5 pair of flats.

It was easier said than done, but after a grueling 3 weeks, I managed to reduce the number of clothes and accessories by 75%. And my wardrobe never looked better. Now I just have to keep it this way for the rest of my life!!

It would be fun to know if anyone has done this before. Will be awesome to share tips and tricks, or even words of wisdom on this matter J

My final number of items: (based on my weekly laundry routine – I’m guessing the number may be higher if you do your laundry fortnightly)

Work:

10 Work Dresses

12 Work Tops – I use 3 specialty shirt hangers from LifeSpace 

4 Work Skirts – I use 1 multi skirt hanger from LifeSpace 

3 Work Pants – I use 1 multi pants hanger from LifeSpace

5 Sets of Suits

Non-work:

3 Pairs of Jeans

5 Pairs of Shorts

10 Sets of clothes that I wear at home

4 T-Shirts (I feel I’m getting too old for t-shirts)

10 Formal Dresses

10 Casual Dresses

12 Casual Tops – again I use the multi shirt hangers from LifeSpace

4 Sets of Exercise Clothes

2 Hiking Pants

Outerwear:

5 Jackets

2 Coats

3 Sport Jackets

5 Casual Jackets

4 Vests

Shoes: (The hardest of them all)

3 Closed Toes Heels

3 Open Toes Heels

2 Flats

2 Walking Shoes

3 Thongs

2 Wedges Sandals

Bags:

1 Overnight Bag

5 Medium/Large Totes

7 Small Bags

I feel like the numbers are still a bit high, but I have trouble parting with some of them. We’ll see how we go in the next quarterly cleanup.