Mess is magnetic...

[NotTakenUsername]

...isn’t it? And I have been battling for years to get my house clutter free and tidy.

I know... I just bloody know if I could get there I could stay there. But how do I get there in the first place?

It’s like brushing your teeth while eating cornflakes.

It certainly is! I'm going through a long over due mass cull of stuff at the moment, so I can't profess to having the answers. In terms of getting rid of stuff I've just been really ruthless. The catalyst was having to get a new roof and having to move all of the junk out of the loft. It's stressful having so much stuff around, but I try to imagine how nice the house will look when there's less junk in it. Short term pain, long term gain.

There was lots of stuff which we'd forgotten we had and clearly don't need, so that stuff mostly got binned, it was mostly old pillows and duvets which to be honest were so scruffy I wouldn't even donate to an animal shelter! There was loads of old curtains which are dated in style but in good condition, so they'll get taken to the charity. We'll check they also accept rags in case they don't think they'll sell.

Do you have anyone who lives with you who can help? The main obstacle I find is it's tedious to go through everything and it can feel quite overwhelming. I've got DP helping me and I've also seen it as an opportunity to point out how much stuff he has which he doesn't actually use or need. My goal is to get rid of around 50% of what we have or move the equivalent up into the loft so it's not cluttering up the house. DP is a bit more of the 'but it might come in userful' mindset, so I'm going to make a separate pile for these items in the loft and if they're not used in the next year I'll get rid.

It really is magnetic! I have very similar feelings re. clutter. I try to do a little at a time but still have so much stuff.

Before we moved house last year I was ruthless and we had to live in utter mess in the living room for about three weeks. I dumped everything in there that had to go, I put tons of it on either fb selling or free groups, bagged up the stuff I knew the charity shop would take and distributed amongst several charity shops. We got stuck in over two weekends of doing tip runs, put stuff outside the front garden saying I'm free please take me.

After the move I went through again getting rid of any straggly bits. My house is now clutter free and I'm very strict on myself in not going into charity shops and buying more tat (as my husband calls it). But the only bit that was really stressful was getting the stuff in one place to be gotten rid of and the eleventy trillion messages that needed dealing with asking for the stuff.