You need time to organize a garage sale or online classified ads to sell your belongings - one more reason to start several months before you move. The last thing you want to do is throw away things you’ll need to repurchase.įor example, if you’re moving locally, just throw all your cleaning supplies in a bucket so you don’t have to buy them all over again.Īs you sift through your belongings, create four piles: keep, sell, donate, and trash. Smaller possessions allow more room for error. There are plenty of places where you can donate your used furniture. Or you may find that you can keep your sofa and a chair, but it’s time to give away your loveseat. You may realize you can keep your dining room table, but you need to sell your breakfast table. Look carefully at the floor plan of your new space or do a walk-through with a tape measure to really get a feel for where you can place your tables, chairs, and sofas. You may need all your bedroom furniture, but you may not be able to fit all your living room or dining room furniture. Things get a little trickier when you’re downsizing space but not bedrooms - for example, moving from a 1,800 square-foot, three-bedroom home to a 1,200 square-foot three-bedroom home. It costs money to haul big furniture, and if there’s nowhere to put it, you’ll just have to pay for a storage unit. If you know you’re moving from a three-bedroom home to a two-bedroom home, don’t move three beds, three dressers, and three bedside tables to your new place. It helps to start planning your furniture and other large items first. Start three months in advance, and aim to finish before the last month in your old home. In the month leading up to your move, it’s too late to do a proper job of decluttering and removing everything not coming with you. Essential Tips for Downsizing and Decluttering 1. That’s why it’s important to follow these important steps. But regardless of the reason you’re downsizing, you’ve got to declutter to reach that goal.Īnd the key is purging your life of things you don’t need without getting rid of those you do. And that’s just one of many reasons to downsize. It doesn’t hurt that smaller houses are cheaper too. It’s why I find the tiny house movement captivating: that forced minimalism requires you to strip away all the unnecessary trappings of modern life to focus more on people, experiences, and activities rather than stuff. It creates an endless mindset of consumerism, of buy-buy-buy. The inverse also proves true: The larger the home you live in, the more things you feel you need to fill it up. When you live in a smaller home, it forces you to decide what really matters to you. There’s something to that famous line in “Fight Club”: “The things you own end up owning you.” I’ve upsized, downsized, and same-sized, but every single move has reinforced the notion that clutter and “things” diminish your life rather than enrich it. You will need:Ĭheck the vacuum bag isn't already full and that the filters are clean, otherwise you're putting in a lot of hard work and not getting the benefit.In the last 15 years, I’ve moved 13 times. Making sure you have everything you need to hand will prevent you from running back and forth to and from your cleaning cupboard all day. Saturday: bedroom, Sunday: cupboard under the stairs, etc. If you're tackling the whole house, it may be a good idea to plan out the job in a calendar, e.g. Try to take it one room at a time so that if you run out of steam, you can still navigate your way through the house without being stressed out by your own belongings. At the start of the job when motivation is running high, it can be tempting to bite off more than you can chew and end up overwhelmed in a sea of bin bags and cardboard boxes.
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