Piles of stuff everywhere. Aaaarrgh!

[TickledOnion]

Does anyone else just have piles and piles of stuff? It's driving me mad. We have recently got a cleaner but she doesn't know where things go (to be fair, neither do I), so she piles things up neatly and cleans under and around them.
So we have a clean but untidy house which is driving me mad. I don't know how to start the job of moving everything back to it's rightful place. Every so often I chuck some stuff that is in the wrong room or in a pile into a box and try to find a home for it. But then I just end up with boxes of stuff instead of piles of stuff. Or the same piles but in a different room.
Can anyone help? I'm not a hoarder so I will happily throw things out, but I don't know where to start.
Thanks

You need to get some decent storage so that everything has a home and then get everyone in the house to learn to put things away. Not sure exactly what sort of stuff you are talking about, but clothes in wardrobes and drawers, shelves for books/dvds/ boxes of toys, filing cabinet/box/desk for papers and documents, newspaper rack for newspapers and magazines (but be very strict about throwing stuff out) rack for shoes and hooks for coats. I'd go room by room, look at what you need to store and think about what you need to store it in. Only keep as much as you have room for iyswim - ie if you have more books than will fir on your shelves get rid of some.

First you need to get rid of any rubbish, so go through the whole house chucking obvious junk.

Then have a box for each room and put things that don't belong in that room into it. Find homes for as many as possible.

At least then you can see what you're dealing with.

Thanks for your help.
It seems obvious now that I think about it, that we don't have enough storage so all the stuff ends up on the surfaces.
I think I'll have a go at chucking out the rubbish tonight, I've been putting it off for too long.

Don't try to tackle too much at once though, else you'll be in a right mess. Do a sweep through to get rid of the obvious rubbish/recycling etc, but after that you need to go room by room.

I would say not even room by room actually, more like drawer by drawer. You will soon see if there is a room/area where a lot of things need to be but you have no storage for them. Then you can either relocate furniture from elsewhere in the house where it isn't needed, or go and get something new.

A quick tip for when you do come to buy some more storage, fewer but bigger is often better. A room can look really cluttered with loads of small bits of furniture, or storage boxes or whatever and you can still end up with things which won't fit in them. Buying something a bit bigger will give you a much neater result.

Good luck!

What ali said

I bet you have more stuff than you really want or need too. Have a big declutter.

no advice, only sympathy - I'm about to go on a mission of my own to bin the useless stuff we've got! good luck!

6 bin bags I took to the charity shop last week, and yet I still feel the clutter creeping up again. I did the drawer by drawer thing too. Good luck!

Well, I didn't do any rubbish chucking out last night. Instead I watched TV. And this morning I've made 2 cakes! I am the queen of procrastination! :-)

This might be obvious, but one thing that helped us was a decent bin in every single room. Otherwise, I ended up with piles of stuff that were waiting to be sorted, or bits that didn't quite make it to the bin in the next room. I deal with post better because I bin stuff immediately.

3 boxes - Keep, Chuck and Charity. Once you've done that, decent storage for each room is essential, as is making sure everyone puts their own stuff away