Learn how to downsize your home, stress free!

When it comes to your home, bigger does not always mean better. While it’s certainly attractive on the eye, the larger your home, the larger the mortgage and maintenance bills.

Whoever said “bigger is better” was not talking about houses. The more space and storage within our home, the more we tend to clutter them with “stuff”. Like kids’ baby stuff in the loft, or old furniture you didn’t get to taking to the tip, or worse unopened boxes from when you moved in!

To counter the stress of modern life, more people are wanting to sell their houses desiring a downsize, or simplify their own homes and have a massive declutter. Instead choosing something that is more economically feasible and psychologically manageable.

Moving to a smaller residence or wanting to simplify your life is a natural course of action is you are facing financial struggles or finding it difficult to keep up with the upkeep and maintenance of your current home, but there are a number of others reason you may want to downsize, including:

You are approaching retirement or experiencing empty nest syndrome.

You want to move to a specific location.

You want less space for less clutter or you want to complete declutter your own space.

You want to save money.

Are you ready for something simpler or smaller and wanting to know how to downsize your home? Here’s some tips to stride towards your goal of living the life you want.

It’s time to take the pressure off and ease into a new way of life.

Work out how much space you really need-

Do you live alone or in a couple? Do you have kids? Do you need extra space to work from home? Do you have many visitors? Do you have any pets? Weigh up your needs and priorities before home hunting or a big clear out as this will help you stay focused when going through your belongings.

When looking at new properties make sure you consider the floor plan carefully, measure space dimensions and storage options, compare your current space and try to map out your new space with what you’ll want and need for your new home.

Take a detailed inventory of your belongings

To help you sort through your stuff faster and with efficiency, create different categories/boxes for your belongings. Mark out one for items that have sentimental value such as family photos, gifts, jewellery. Have another box solely dedicated to objects that have a practical purpose such a tools, and another for important documents/work stuff such as tax documents and then you can create other categories such a “things to recycle/throw away”, “things to give away”, “duplicates” and any others you think that will help you to go over your belongings with efficiency. Writings these categories and their contents will help you to whittle down items to those that are absolutely necessary and unnecessary.

Follow the declutter rules

If you haven’t used, worn or even looked at in the last 12 months, bin it!

If it doesn’t work or is broken, bin it!

If you think it might one day be useful, but you’ve never used it, bin it! 

To store or not to store when downsizing?

The time you have available to downsize your home can have a considerable impact on your sorting process, not to mention the stress involved. Don’t forget that moving is considered one of the most stressful life events.

The hardest thing when figuring out how to downsize your house is deciding which things you will get rid of. Memories, high value items and items we’ve had since we were little are always objects we struggle to part with, but it’s highly advisable to follow the above when downsizing. If you just don’t have the room in your new home, you should really dig deep and figure out why you believe you need to keep so many items.

If you are having a hard time letting go of your possessions, the good news is that you can still keep some of them by renting a suitable storage unit, but don’t let this make you fill it with things you really don’t need. Only get a storage unit if you really don’t have the space in your new home for items you just can’t part with.

Digitize!

If after going over your belongings you still have lots of photos and documents spilling out of boxes It may not be storage you need, but to get digitizing!

You may not want to store some sentimental photographs as for many the memory is in the photo album or the physical photo but there are many documents that people store they really don’t need to. Paper is a big reason for clutter, the average person stores thousands of papers! These can be work documents, receipts, tax information and more. Go through your documents and start either digitally storing them or shredding them.

From a cloud storage system to a thumb-sized SD card, you can save yourself so much space by digitalising your stuff. Not only is your data safer but you can say good-bye to bulky storage boxes forever. 

Sell or donate your unwanted items

When sorting through your belongings you are bound to come across a lot of unnecessary, old, unused or unwanted items. Some of them will end up in the trash, if it does have some monetary value or it is in a good condition, why not think about donating or selling it? Online markets like Facebook Market and Ebay make selling unwanted items a doddle, but if time is a factor why not donate your items to a local charity shop or donation centre. Many donation center’s will even come to your home so getting rid of them is even easier.

Give yourself a break

Downsizing your home means going through practically everything you own so make sure not to pile too much on yourself at once. Before heading straight on into the heavy task of downsizing make sure you give yourself a plan deciding if you want to take days, weeks or months to go through your home. Decide what rooms to start and end with. Give yourself enough preparation time to get your downsizing-game-face-on. By doing this process, you will clearly see what you need and do not need.

Get rid of the excess baggage you don’t need in your life!