Do you find yourself making these kinds of mistakes when you are organising? Well, here are 8 common mistakes that people tend to make when decluttering and organising the garage, bedroom, kitchen or other storage space, so that you can avoid them in your own home!
1. Putting off actually starting the project
I’m guilty of this one. I’m always aware that areas of the house need a good clear-out and re-organising, but I feel overwhelmed and never know where to start, then end up leaving it for weeks or even months later. But once i tackle the project, it never takes as long as i initally thought it would. Of course life can get busy at times, but when you do get spare chunk of time then just start the project instead putting in off.
2. Buy storage bins or storage containers before you organise
It can be tempting to head out and buy all the cute storage bins and drawer organisers, right?! Way before you even get around to organising. And be honest with yourself, how many times has it happened where you use every organising piece that you’ve brought? Probably never! So before rushing out to buy all the cute, eye-pleasing storage containers, really think about how you’re wanting it to look and where you need 1000 storage bins or could declutter and end up only needing 1 or 2.
Here’s a couple of important steps when organising:
- First, go through everything.
- Discard everything and anything that you no longer need or want.
- Then sort out all of your remaining items into categories.
- Make a plan of where you are want to store everything – plan for shelving an containers.
- Lastly, organise everything into their places.
3. Giving up because you don’t have the perfect storage pieces
When you only have a small budget and don’t have huge amounts of space, like when you see pictures of celebrities or influencers’ houses in magazines or on their social media pages.
Well, the good news is no rule says you have to have the perfect storage pieces to be organised and you don’t have to buy a new storage bin to organise either, instead, you can reuse old storage bins that you aren’t currently using. But if you don’t have any storage pieces available, that shoudn’t stop you, just call the part where you start organise and declutter as ‘Phase 1’.
Okay, it might not be picture-perfect or what you see across social media, but if the space is usable for what you want it for, then that’s a win!
4. Keeping too much stuff
This is probably the BIGGEST mistake that I and a lot of other tend to do. A storage area of the house can very quickly become a “catch-all” and therefore it tends to become a place where you just chuck everything. But if you want it to be organised then it can be, you still need to go through everything once in a while and consciously choose to keep items that you use and love, and discard anything that you no longer need.
Yep, it might be hard to part ways with certain things, but the feeling that you feel when you have organised space which can be used and enjoyed, instead have the place where you hold on to stuff that you might find a use for “someday”.
5. Don’t know where to get rid of unwanting items quickly
Even when you have decided what you want to get rid of – sell or donate – it can still be a big job to get rid of them! If you are finding that your unwanted stuff is going quick enough, then give away the items [if you can afford to] to people who might need it more than you need the money.
6. they store items randomly rather than in some sort of order
Organising your messy garage? The place that probably has the most random items being stored in it – DIY supplies, bikes and other odd bits and bobs. By sorting out and mapping out the zones into different categories can make it easier to find things.
7. No room for additional items
Often when people organise a room or a specific area, they organise the space so much that they forget about new stuff that they might acquire, leaving them with nowhere to put the items.
Remember when your organising, we go through different phases of life, meaning our needs will change and inevitably, you’ll end up getting more stuff. So leave extra storage space knowing that you’ll most likely to get newly acquired items in the future.
8. MAKING FREQUENTLY USED ITEMS MORE DIFFICULT TO PUT AWAY
When place has been declutter and organising, the easiest way for the space to got back to being cluttered again is because things aren’t put back where they belong. And if it’s difficult for things to be returned to their designated spot, then we had the tendency to get lazy and throw items anywhere, think that we will put it back in the correct spot later. [which lets be honest, never happens!]
Don’t get me wrong, even when you try to make it easier as possible to put things back to where they belong, there still isn’t a 100% success rate, except there is a higher chance for things to get messy if it was harder to return things.
