6 reasons to make your home look cluttered

You have cleaned your home well. You have tidied up each room. But it still doesn’t look as you hoped for. It still feels messy and untidy despite all your efforts. This is a very common problem. Sometimes “we cannot see the forest for the trees” because we live in our homes and we see each room every day. This makes us simply ignore things that exist for such a long time that they have become part of the interior. Let’s look at some very common reasons for our houses to seem jammed. Afterwards we can review and solve these problems for good.

REASON 1: PILED UP BOARDS AND SHELVES

When your kitchen boards are cluttered, the space looks ‘dirty’ even if it is not. It’s also true for the bathroom surfaces. If you think about it, when you go to a hotel room, all surfaces are almost empty and look spacious and clean. The same feeling should be true for your own home. The solution is to make optimal use of cupboards and drawers. Put everything you can in and leave only a minimum number of items on the surfaces both in your bathroom and your kitchen. This will make them look clean and spacious, and provide that tidiness you were after.

I suppose you will tell me that there is not enough room in the drawers but in this case, there are two options – add a new cabinet or drawers, or you may realise there are too many things around that you don’t really need.

REASON 2: TOO MANY DECORATIONS

Every designer knows that when it comes to home decorations, it is easy to go overboard. Each room needs some space that provides ‘rest for the eyes’, meaning that not every inch needs to be adorned. It may be too many family photos, too many trinkets, too many collections of objects, etc.

An otherwise clean room, overdone with decorations, still looks ‘messy’. The solution here is to reduce the decorations to a minimum. Not every book you own should be on display. Not every family photo needs to hang on the wall.

Inspect your space and take off the old photos and decorations. Put them in an album or in a beautiful box. Put away part of the figurines, souvenirs, candles, decorative plates, fancy cups and whatever pretty things you keep exposed at home. You can choose to leave only some of your favourite ones, which you can change later. In this way you will not only make your home look clean and tidy but you will change its vision, too. Try to leave an empty space in every room. Senses need a break.

Try it and the result will surprise you.

REASON 3: MESSY ENTRANCE HALL

The entrance hall is the first thing we see when we come home. Shoes, coats, gloves, shopping bags, school bags, wallets, keys for the apartment, the garage, the car... The entrance hall is the room that contains all these things. And it is this part of our house that is so important!

In Feng Shui the front door is ‘the mouth of chi’. Energy and opportunities enter our home through it. If the space around the front door is crammed, our entire home would look like that. What is more, we usually have a mirror there and it doubles the mess!

Here are some ideas that may be of use when dealing with the mess.

Put the shoes in order. If you don’t have enough room in the shoe drawer, put those you don’t use on a daily basis in boxes and stack them in an accessible manner.
Regularly clean the piles of coats and jackets from that zone.
Install a small metal key box on the wall and put the various sets of keys in it.
A small cane bin or box near the front door will help you store the remaining little items, such as wallets, hats, gloves, etc.
Making room for all these objects will eliminate the chaos and will help you leave the house faster in the morning because you will know where everything is kept.
And one more thing: unblock the front door. Everything that stands on its way when fully opening or closing is also blocking the energy from entering your house.

REASON 4: THE FRIDGE

Often the door of the fridge turns into a colourful vision board that distracts your senses. Magnets, lists, children’s drawings... Even the cleanest kitchen looks messy if the fridge is covered with all sorts of bric-a-brac that we have put on it and simply forgot to take down.

Let’s have a closer look at this situation. The fridge is not a stage or evidence for the places we have visited. There surely is a better way to keep our memories alive. If you like magnets, select some, put them on the door and enjoy them for a couple of weeks. Then put them in a beautiful box and put different magnets on display. Remove all lists or at least clean them up regularly. Collect the children’s drawings in a folder to preserve them better.

REASON 5: PAPER PILES

Everyone is prone to creating paper stacks from time to time: bills, notes, bank documents, old medical tests, the instruction booklets for the washing machine, dishwasher, the iron, the contracts for the children’s extracurricular classes, the car insurance papers (some of them for years long passed), advertisements, brochures, magazines that we meant to read but never did. How many times have you actually opened the instruction booklet for the coffee machine? Me, never. But we keep it, don’t we? What to do?

Train yourself to deal instantly with paper chaos. Every piece of paper that enters our home should be put in its right place or be thrown away immediately. Here are some handy ideas for organisation.

Divide things into really important and unimportant. Select several folders or storage boxes. I use beautiful flat boxes, labelled so that I can easily orient myself what is inside. Label one for the contracts that are still in power, the bank documents that are really important and other financial papers. Don’t forget that most people now use online banking, so you can always check if the financial transactions that you have signed at the bank and received a document thereof, are already registered in your bank account. In that case, why do you need to keep the copy? Naturally, if you are paying back a loan, put it in the box.
You can label another box for the medical tests that are really important and a third one for the documents related to your job like invoices and contracts that you don’t keep at the office or you work from home.
The documents of the electrical appliances, except those in warranty, in most cases are unnecessary. You just need to type the model name on the internet and you will find sufficient technical information plus videos with know-how for its maintenance.
Develop the habit of sorting all papers in the right boxes immediately. It will help you find things faster and prevent chaos.
Go through these boxes at least once a year and throw away the papers that no longer matter. It’s such a pleasant feeling.
And of course, take the waste paper for recycling, don’t throw it in the bin. Every time I do this I am aware that I have done a tiny effort to help my children live in a cleaner world and it is also setting a good example for them to follow.

From Space and Rituals with love