Your top, ruthless decluttering tips

[december2020]

We're currently planning to renovate the upstairs bedrooms and having a bit of a full house decluttering purge (probably due to expecting our first child so full nesting mode has been activated).

Please help me with your best tips and tricks to make it "bite sized", manageable and to be absolutely ruthless,

I keep staring at it all and need to kick my arse into gear now!

I've made £700 during lockdown by selling crap on ebay that nobody was using or will be missing - the only reason I started selling stuff was that I had no access to charity shops...

My top tips:
Dont look at the huge job of needing to totally sort out the whole house (this is what paralysed me for a long time). Get Rid Of ONE Thing.
Then get rid of One Other Thing.
The feeling of relief will be immense and the next Getting Rid will come more naturally until you cannot stop.

I agree more storage or even more space/bigger house can just lead to more stuff, so can be counter productive.

I like the idea of only keeping what is either useful, beautiful or of sentimental value - we will all be different in what is important to us. I did just throw about 10 years worth of Christmas cards away...

Clean as you go along. While I am not an obessive housekeeping I did think that our house was comfortably clean, but OMG.... the nooks and crannies my decluttering unearthed were a public health worry

Do little and often. And keep going. It is deeply satisfying.
All I need to find now is the courage to tackle the 'home office' aka Room of Doom

I go through everything once a year - if it’s not been used in that year it goes, unless it makes my heart sing. If I love something it gets to stay even if never used.
Exception to these rules are tools - we do all our own diy/maintenance and some tools are very rarely used but expensive to replace.