oh please help, I'm drowning under a sea of clutter, piles of laundry, i can't find anything including socks arghhh....

[sheepgomeep]

I have 4 dc, 2 step dc and theres me and my dp, a dog and a hamster in a 3 bed. Our drawers, cupboards airing cupboard are fit to burst, We have no storage space at all, no cuboard under stairs, our towels have to be kept in the bathroom on the floor. I have got 16 sets of bedding. 40 pairs of kids pyjamas, no space in my loft.

We both work and life is so busy its beyond a joke. How on earht do I sort this. and my laundry oh .my. god..

Can you get rid of stuff or are you a hoarder? I am a bit of a hoarder, but am quite happy to give stuff away on freecycle/freegle, as I know it's going to a "good" home, rather than to landfill.

Start with one thing, may be the bedding. Do you need 16 sets? Really? Work out how many you do need, choose that many and freecycle the rest.

Next, towels - again, have you got too many? Don't worry initially about where you are going to put them, just if you have too many. Choose the right amount and freecycle the rest.

I find just tackleling one thing at a time helps. Also, www.flylady.net is fab.

well there are 6 beds and a cot, double that amount (one set on each bed and 1 spare thats at least 14 sets. I do like to have spare sets in case of accidents. But yes towels I have way too many and I think thats next to go.

Yep, sorry to say, your only solution is to have less stuff.

You're going to have to be ruthless. I don't see why you need two sets of linen for each bed. If four of those beds are single, I would keep maybe six sets of single linen and chuck two. What are the chances that all four DC are going to have an accident on the same night?

Strip it down to the bare minimum. Everyone gets, say, two pairs of trousers, three tops, underwear, one coat. Don't save stuff to hand down, unless your DC are spaced so it goes straight off the bigger child's back onto the smaller child's. You don't have room for boxes of clothing to be sitting around waiting three years for a DC to grow into it. Secondhand clothing is so cheap that it is not worth storing.

Same with toys. I noticed recently that DD only plays with her dolls' house, her Etch-a-Sketch, a little bucket of plastic frogs, and a wee plastic dog on wheels. I am seriously thinking about getting rid of everything else.

Put the word out charmingly and politely that you would rather people didn't buy gifts for your household that you would have to find room for. Family passes, iTunes vouchers and bottles of wine are fabulous gifts!

Another trick that won't solve your storage problem but will make your house feel less cluttered is try to avoid patterned fabrics - curtains, upholstery, rugs and duvet covers should all be plain, so your eyes have somewhere to rest.

There's a very good reason that estate agents stage houses with neutrals.

Store stuff at a relative's house?
Rent a storage unit?
Ceiling airer for laundry?
Get a carpenter in to build custom made storage for odd corners?

We managed to create more room in our house by having loft beds. You can store stuff underneath or have a desk or sitting area. They're great. Even me and dh have a double one.

I do my washing then hang stuff up to dry on a metal free standing clothes rail in the corner of the bedroom. If I run out of room on that, I hang the clothes up in the window on the curtain rail - we don't have curtains, just blinds, but the curtain rail still comes in handy.

Once the clothes are dry, I just hang straight up in the wardrobes, then iron clothes the day before I wear them. I never have laundry lying around.

If you're near to an Ikea store, they have some great ideas for storage in smaller houses. We don't have much space, but you just have to be imaginative. Ikea storage units/shelving is quite tall so it makes a lot of use of the wall space. You can also fix shelves up, then store stuff in boxes on the shelves. Build right up to the ceiling if you can.

Try to get some plastic boxes and store items in those. It keeps the dust off and you can stack them up. You can store bedding and towels in the boxes. Perhaps have a box for each person so that their bedding can go into that, rather than having it all piled up in the same place somewhere.

Do you have room for a shed in the backyard/garden area? It's surprising how much stuff you can store in a shed.

(1) Feed the hamster to the dog. That's one less thing to cope with
(2) If your beds have space under them use it (get underbed boxes and vacuum bags and shrink everything - yes it gets crushed - so what).
(3) Bunk beds are your friend.
(4) Use vertical storage where you have a low footprint per person - so get racks which hang on the wall to store things, the trick is to keep the floor clear and then it's easy to clean and it doesn't feel like chaos.
(5) If all else fails buy a caravan and park it in your garden, move yourself into it and leave them to the chaos.

Assuming you have 5 single beds, why don't you have 5 sets of bedding and 3 spare neutral ones for the times you can't get washed and dried in one day or sickness/accident.

We have 4 single beds but only 6 sets of single bedding.

If you have a tumble dryer there is no reason to have more than a couple of spare sets - wash and dry and put back on.

We have tall storage - stuff that makes the most of the height of the rooms and the bare minimum of clothing, you wash it and dry it on the hangers and it goes away again. They always wear their few favourite things anyway.

When the dc were little we put a 2nd rail in standard double wardrobe half way down - toddler could reach the stuff at the bottom and we put the baby stuff at the top.

At one point we had all 3 of my youngest sharing 1 double wardrobe! We also got tall drawers - the ikea 6 drawer ones, lots of shelves up on the walls. Kept them in cots/cot beds as long as possible and then into bunk beds with drawer things underneath

That's a really good idea cargirl :)

I don't have anything like your space problem but I still only have one set of bedding for each child's bed, plus a spare set, and one towel per child. I just wash and tumble and put straight back on the bed/in the bathroom. I think you need to be ruthless about your household linens - they really do take up a lot of storage space. You should wash your spares and put them in one of those vacuum space bags in your loft, until another set of linen needs replacing. Children really don't need more than two pairs of pyjamas each.

Also - sort clothes into winter and summer, wash all the winter ones now, throw away anything that is horrible and put all the rest in vacuum space bags in the loft until September. All your coats and anoraks and all jumpers but one can be put away now.

You need to be equally ruthless with things like plates and kitchen equipment - pare it all down to a working minimum. And sort your loft out - if there are large things you want to keep but won't use for more than a year, rent some storage for it, so that you can use your loft for clothes etc that you will need again soon.

Only 3 of us here, but a 5 roomed bungalow and thats hard enough!
Similar to cargirl but we put shelves in the bottom 2/3 of the wardrobe. Strengthened up a cheapy wardrobe and room for toys in bottom plus all the clothes.
We use smallish toy boxes for all toys, cars in 1, animals in another, play food etc then they stack neatly. Limited linen, just one spare set per bed.
Vacuum bags for spare duvet/pillows, winter jumpers etc
My MIL has a sock drawer in her kitchen, pairs them after washing (where poss!) everyone roots thru that.
I'm trying to educate mine into not automatically putting stuff in the wash if it doesnt really need it, change out of clean going out stuff and into play clothes from day before that sort of thing.
Good luck x

Anything you have too many of (like towels) - lay them out in order of how old/nice they are. Then get rid of the worse half (bin, charity bag, recycling).

My house is full of stuff too!

Today I have excavated two boxes of random stuff and thrown most of it away. I have also bagged up five duvets to go to be recycled. Five! How the hell did I collect that many?

I agree with others, pick one task at a time. It might take ages, but over time little patches of fabulousness will emerge from the chaos :o

So I keep telling myself anyway...

I think it is helpful to think of each room as a cube/cuboid. How much of that space are you really utilising for storage?

There is no point having a wardrobe that comes only 2/3 up the wall and nothing above it.

It may be a case of getting rid of some of your exisiting furniture and buying storage that better suits your needs.

Sort washing out once dry. Get all the stuff that doesnt need ironing away straight away. Dont leave it to grow but I'm struggling to see how you know whose socks are which??? You can get the older children to sort through, pair and put away underwear.

How often are you changing the beds, really dont worry about it absotely no more than once a fortnight. Wasting your time.

The local laundrette does a good service surely its worth subbing out bedding. Maybe cost effective your machine must be dying a death!

OMG, thats all I can say, 4 of us here in a 2 bed bungalow. I would do a runner!

thank you all for your replies, lots of things to think about here I think,

wmmc yy to feeding the hamster to the dog he he, don't tempt me. Mind you our gold fish has just karked it so that frees up a bit more space.

Our house isn't a particularly small 3 bed house but it is a 1950's prefab steel house with lovely plaster board walls so anything heavy on shelves is a no no as we found out 2 years a go when one fell off the wall and nearly injured dd1. Its such an odd internal design with walls in odd places, tons of unecessary doors and we cannot put furniture along one wall in dd's room and our room due to airing cupboard and zig zag walls. weird house.

I am definetely going to get rid of most of my clothes, I did start today and i intend to buy those vacuum bag things thats a very good idea.

Already have bunk beds (2 sets in dd's room) when dd3 is old enough to go into her sisters room there will be 5 girls in a room! so something has to go.

I'm going to sort out everything lol, can't get to the launderette though as we don't have a car.

I've got 2 very old faded and frayed towels that are 12 years old. seriously. I can't bring myyself to chuck them because they are my ds's first ever towels. someone give me a stern talking to, they are just towels ffs

We have a lot of trofast storage from Ikea as again they do quite tall units with big bins.

But with girls it is the amount of clothes you accumulate. Be ruthless, realistically they probably only weat tehir 3 favourite outfits most of the time! With knickers I named them as they are all such a similar size. With socks I've bought 10 pairs of school socks each in 3 different designs - easy to match.

They play sock snap to help sort the pants/socks etc into their own piles.

Its funny I've noticed that as well car girl especially with dd1. It's always her favourite stuff I see on her mainly hello kitty tops and jeans and a few nice t shirts

I have a big bin full of odd socks. Its got so bad that my mil regularly takes our odd socks home to pair them on an evening when she has nothing to do

I announce with a smile, sock time and they do it begrudingly but it's done. I recently had yet another sort out of their clothes and found a few missing odd socks!

Be so so ruthless with their clothes, stop buying them. Even my 5 year old happily went through her clothes and chose which things she liked and didn't I also did it with the winter clothes that I have ready for her to grow into - so that was half gone. All 3 girls did this, lots of space now saved.

Well the teenager (no 4) gets through clothes like we do chocolate but it's her money and her mess and I leave her to it.

Take photos of things you really need to throw away but would like a memento of :)