Chrissy Halton, owner of Innerspace Interior Design

This week guest blogger and friend of STORE Chrissy Halton gives her top tips on banishing clutter and maximising your storage space:

Before starting on any new restyle or redecoration you need to look at what you already have, and decide on what you want to keep, and what can be re-housed.

 Decluttering a room can transform it – and possibly saves the need for complete redecoration as it gives the whole space a new lease of life. Your decoration and accessories can get lost amongst the clutter collected in everyday life very easily. People constantly strive for the modern, show home look so that they can have friends round and feel proud of their home – but it is often easy to forget that show homes are NOT real life – they do not have to have all the items that we all collect during our lives cluttering up the place, and they can be seen to be more spacious and thus more enticing.

In recent years the term “decluttering” has a very bad press, and is thought only to refer to those houses that you can barely walk around for the mess. In actual fact we all have clutter in our homes, it’s a fact of life! Clutter is simply anything that is not needed or loved in your home, or something that is not in its correct home. Therefore the only thing we need to be wary of is keeping it under control, and that can make all the difference in a design scheme, and will make or break it. You can have the most beautiful home, but if it has clutter (to whatever level) it will never feel as comfortable and relaxing and finished as you would like.

There are many reasons why we have clutter in our houses – life is busy and it is inevitable that some amount of clutter will build up. But it should be noted that it can make people depressed and unable to relax in their own home. They may feel overwhelmed at the task of sorting everything out, and many just start to ignore it. However, if it’s kept under control it is easier to create a beautiful and relaxing home.

 But the question is – where do you start?

First things first – prepare! Have a variety of storage boxes, bin liners and containers to hand, along with sticky labels, marker pens etc. This will make your life easier as you go through your home.

Start with one room/area at a time. For every item you find, ask yourself whether you want to keep it or get rid of it.

If you want to get rid of it, is it rubbish/recycling or could it be given to charity/family/friends? – have a box for each, and start to fill them!

If you want to keep it, ask yourself whether it is in the right room /area and whether it is useful or beautiful. Keeping items grouped together will help you have a more organised home (wrapping paper and cards stored with pens and sticky tape for example will make life easier when you come to someones birthday!). If an item is beautiful – where can you show it off to its best advantage (this will help you when you are restyling a room – you will know exactly what you have and where you want it to be seen – always a good starting point).

 Other handy hints for de-cluttering and organising your home are as follows:-

Keep wardrobes and rooms more organised by rotating with the seasons. Pack away items that are out of the current season (i.e. in summer you won’t need jumpers and coats, and your home will look fresher without the heavy curtains and throws you bought in the winter). When the next season comes around, pack away what you don’t need and get out of storage what you do. This is a great way of restyling your home easily, as most people have so much in their homes that you can’t put it all on display easily. By splitting up into seasons you can appreciate all your accessories at different times of the year, and create a refreshing change at the same time!

Take one area at a time – you will then start to see a real difference rather than if you jump from place to place.

For a family why not have colour coordinated storage boxes in the hallway – then anything that needs to be done/moved can be put into that persons box rather than put in piles that create a cluttered look in even the tidiest of houses (this can be done with post, toys, school bags, shoes and much more). This can create a very stylish and practical storage solution.

 So by now you will have thrown away, recycled, given away and packed away – and you will be left only with those things you need and those that you really love. At this point you will have a much better view of your home, and the space each room has. Now is the perfect time to assess the space and create the room design that you want. You won’t have to work around items that you don’t want to keep, and you can really see what you have to work with. You can now start accessorising your home and creating that all important new look.  

 Get rid of the clutter, create space, and get that beautiful home!

This guest blog was written by friend of STORE Chrissy Halton who is owner of the Innerspace Home Organisation Company and a professional declutterer. Chrissy works across the North West assisting clients with interior styling for both living in and selling their proprety as well as home organisation and decluttering.

We occasionally meet despairing customers in our Chester STORE, disheartened by their own clutter and inability to maintain neat and tidy storage in their homes just a few days or weeks after they’ve had a really good go at getting organised and streamlining their space.

If you’re reading this and thinking “that’s me, I try but I never seem to stay organised after the event” then keep reading because being aware you’ve got a clutter problem at your place is the first step towards making a change.

One of the keys to decluttering and organising your space is taking control of the flow of ’stuff’ that comes into your life, whether it’s across your desk at work,or with home organisation. And one of the biggest storage and organisational issues I’m always quizzed about in our shops is, how to effectively control and store post and paperwork.

Firstly, make sure that the flow of items through the letterbox and general paperwork you pick-up elsewhere is effectively stored in an in-tray, file box, or even a series of colour coded plastic boxes, each for different subjects or people in your house. Popping mail and paperwork into A4 sized storage boxes is going to instantly provide gratification via a more organised storage routine but the key to decluttering and staying on top of the reams of paperwork in these storage box in-trays is to manage the ‘through flow’ and indeed ‘out flow’ of paperwork you store in them.

A great tip I gleaned from a storage professional across the pond was to think of these colour coded storage boxes for your post in the same way as you think of your kitchen sink. Most of us (even STORE’s warehouse manager Kevin) have a natural tolerance for how long we leave dishes cluttering-up the sink and draining board. For some people it’s a day or two and others can’t stand to go to bed at night without doing the washing-up. Have this same tolerance threshold to your household post and paperwork: open, read, action and decisively discard or file and you’ll notice the differences within a few days.

The more you perform this simply paperwork decluttering task, the more your awareness will grow of better organisation. This transferable organisational skill can be used in other areas of your home too and over time you’ll naturally become more conscious about what you bring into the house and indeed what you spend your hard earned pennies on. You see, decluttering and reorganising is a money-saver too!

There’s a school of thought amongst profession declutterers  that says you should try to treat your space with a little more respect if you really want to take control of your clutter.  The theory goes that the inside of your home is a reflection of you and the organisation within should reflect the life you want to live.  Getting organised and decluttering your pad could therefore be the answer to enjoying the space you live in and maybe also allow you to take a little more control of your life.

With this mantra in mind, I have a New Year’s confession…despite being a purveyor of storage solutions, my own kitchen (specifically the storage space in my kitchen) is currently in a terrible mess. I’m not sure whether it’s the product of having a new baby and no time on our hands or just the fact that we’ve abused our kitchen storage cupboards over Christmas in the rush to fatten-up our guests!

Deciding that the best way to spend the first real Friday night of the New Year was to declutter our kitchen storage cupboards, I set to work (post Celebrity Big Brother) to find a solution to my resolution and take control of our cluttered kitchen.

I must say having completed the task at a shade before midnight I got a real buzz from seeing all the neatly stored tins and tidy cutlery drawers despite the fact that my partner now says she can’t find a thing!

So, while they’re fresh in my mind, here’s my New Year tips for organising your kitchen storage space:

1. Bin Items You Don’t Use…
Up until last night, our kitchen drawers looked like we were collecting utensils to pass down through the generations! We really don’t need 2 blunt bread knifes, the fancy cork screw that doesn’t really work but looks funky and 5 biro pens in the cutlery drawer. So I decided to have a purge and recycle the stuff that’s broken and take anything remotely useful but rarely used to the local charity shop.

2. Containerise With Storage Baskets…

Wicker and seagrass baskets can create a great ordered look on your kitchen shelves and will allow you to group, order and more easily find items. Stash all your tins of soup in a wicker basket on a kitchen shelf and tea-towels in another, or how about using a seagrass basket to store condiments inside a cupboard for easy access when they’re all needed on the dinner table together.

3. Label What you Can’t See…
My partner loves her recipes and has a pile of cookbooks stored inside three big old biscuit tins in a kitchen cupboard next to the cooker. Scrawling “books” on a label is a good start but “Cookbooks” is better; “Recipes: Cakes” or “Pudding Recipes” will make finding a particularly tasty dessert even more easy.

4. Go Visit Our Online Storage Solutions Shop!…
Ok, ok I couldn’t resist a plug at the end. We’ve some really neat kitchen storage solutions in our online shop and here are a few of my favourites:

Drawer Organiser Set No. 2
Simple plastic trays that are tailored to fit standard UK kitchen drawers. Move ‘em around within your kitchen drawers for better storage of utensils and cutlery.

Corner Plate Rack
Neat cost effective storage solution to make the most of kitchen cupboard corners and ensure that all your dinner plates are stacked and organised separately from your side plates.

Spice Stepper
Handy 3-tiered item to store inside your kitchen cupboards to ensure that your spice jars at the rear of the cupboard can be seen and are as easy-to-hand as those at the front.

Mesh Stacking Shelves
Creates extra storage space where there was none. These handy chaps make the most of unused vertical space in your kitchen cupboards.

Sachet & Packet Store
Compact tiered storage box to organise all those sauce sachets, cup-a-soup packets and powered custard sachets etc..

Here’s to a Happy and Organised New Year!    Si