Cleaning Tips – Decluttering Your Living Room

Your living room is one of the most used spaces in your house – both personally and for entertaining guests. As such, you want to keep it clean. For many people a common “mess” problem is clutter. Hence, we’re writing this article that contains a number of cleaning tips to help you with decluttering your living room. 

Why Declutter your Living Room?

Before we cover how to declutter. I also wanted to make a couple of points about WHY you should declutter and the benefits you will see:

Less Cleaning Time

Cleaning around clutter takes longer. Because you have to tidy AND THEN clean. This makes cleaning more time-consuming and more stressful. If you declutter regularly, you will save time.

Less Organising Time

How much time do you waste “looking” for things? If everything has its place, and you have less stuff, things just become easier. You won’t constantly be going through things or looking for things. If everything has a place, then it will also be easier to keep everything clutter free and organised. 

Less Stress

Imagine you could just look around your house and be happy. Instead of looking around your house and being stressed out. Clearing your clutter will do this. Your life will be happier.

Less Debt

 If you have less stuff, you’ll find you want to buy less stuff in future. You won’t also end up with duplicate items when you re-buy things you already own. You might also come across things you don’t use, which you can sell on Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace. Decluttering is good for your bank account.

Decluttering your living room is a simple process and one that everyone should do. Follow the tips we’ve mentioned below and your life will be easier.

Cleaning Tips – Decluttering your Living Room

The first thing that you need to do is to develop a process for decluttering your living room. If you follow a process you know that the whole room will be covered. Here is a suggested order to follow: bookcases, side tables, coffee table, and tv cabinet.

Here’s what you need to do with each. Clear bench tops, empty drawers and look at what you have. If something isn’t in its rightful place, then put it back where it belongs. If something should be thrown out or recycled, do that too. Put books back where they belong, deal with your mail and, if nothing else, find a proper spot for your remote controls. 

Try using the 3 box method if you’ve got a lot of clutter to clean:

Now let’s focus on some different areas individually.

Books, CDs and DVDs

If you have finished a book decide what you are going to do with it. Is it going to go back on the shelf or should you share it with someone else. Make a rule – don’t buy a new book until you have given away some of your old books. Should you get a Kindle? Do you really need those CDs and DVDs? I mean, when did you last open them?

Toys

You probably let your kids have some toys in the living room. It keeps them occupied so you can relax. However, if you do this, then make sure that you have a box for your kids to store their living room toys. The same goes for pets. They don’t need all their toys at once so chuck them in a basket when they’re not being used. 

Shelving and Other Storage Space

For video games and DVDs that you are keeping, you need to have appropriate shelving. You might also want to put hooks on the backs of doors and other areas to increase your storage space. You can then hang things from the hooks to help you store things out of sight.

You might also want to consider dual-purpose furniture pieces. Trunks, ottomans, and couches that have a storage space in them are a great way to maximise your storage space and keep things neat and tidy. Check out Ikea or King Living for some of their ingenious multi-purpose storage options.

Keepsakes

If you have mementos and keepsakes do they all need to be on display? Should you get a box for some of them?

Magazines

Do you really need to keep all of your old magazines? Are you really going to read them again? If you want to keep some of your magazines, make sure you have a storage space for them. If you don’t want to keep them, recycle them or give them away.

Remote Controls

How often do you lose your remote control? Would you prefer NOT losing them? As part of your decluttering process, you should make a permanent place for your remote controls.