Need to urgently declutter a room fast. Hire storage or not?

[IncessantNameChanger]

I wrote a long post but my phone went flat and I lost it, so bear with me if I drip feed a bit.

Basically was me, dh and four kids in a three bed cottage. Eldest had his own room and went to uni in September but has had a mh crisis and is coming home end of Nov.

Situation before was ds20 had the box room. Ds16 and ds12 shared. Dd had a bed in my room and a bunk bed in the boys. Ds20 moves,out and we all shuffle,about so ds16 has the box room.

Ds20 can't have his old room back because it might be for a year or long term. I suspect he wants to stay at home medically unfit possible as a long term thing. I can't cope with that.

The plan is to move him into the dining room. But I need,to empty it plus I need to decltter other areas and store his uni stuff.

Is hiring a storage unit insane? I'm.quite the hoarder but decluttering anyway..I know I can't empty a room aline in month. It was dd toddler room so full of her toys and clothes plus furniture. We partitioned it off and it's tiny. I have no one to help me unless I pay for help. But ds breakdown has sent my mh spirlling and I'm not sure I'm in a good head space to cope with a Stacy solemn moment right now

Hiring storage space isn't insane, and might be a quick fix, but it's not a brilliant idea in my opinion. You'll be better off mentally and financially if you can bring yourself to get rid of stuff. Once you start you'll find it liberating.

Do NOT rent a storage unit.

DO NOT RENT A STORAGE UNIT.

Just don't. These things breed more'stuff'.

Just get rid.

You won't miss any of it.

I appreciate you would like to hear the easy option of hiring a storage unit, but I strongly recommend not doing so. Despite best intentions, you will NEVER empty it. It will be money you pay every month just to store junk you will never go and reclaim.

I appreciate if you are a bit of a hoarder then decluttering can seem like an impossible task. Don’t think if it as all or nothing. Commit to decluttering 5 items from the dining room every day for the next month. When your son moves home, make it a condition that he helps you declutter the rest.

Be ruthless. If you haven’t used it in the last 12 months, it goes. If needed, you can always buy it again (even from a charity shop). If something has sentimental value, consider taking a photo of it and keeping that for the memories, rather than the item itself. Obviously keep family heirlooms or things of value, but not baby clothes or toys. Photo for memories, and donate or throw out.

You will feel so much lighter. It honestly will improve your mental health not to be weighed down by things. Even getting a corner of the room down will be a motivation to keep going.

Goodluck!

Just to add - nothing beats getting started. Go into the room right now and find 5 things to declutter. Right now. Just 5. Do it.

The power of starting is incredible.

5 things x 36 days (now until the end of November) is 180 items. The room will look SO much better. And you’ll have a lot more motivation to finish the job when you see how good it looks (and your son is helping).

I agree with starting to declutter but if you need to give yourself a bit more time, my top tips on saving money on selfstorage are:
Find one which has a price reduction for the first weeks and make sure you give notice and empty it before the price goes up.
Get the smallest space you can - some have a large locker which is plenty
Don't get their insurance - the best and cheapest one I've found in the UK is Surewise (Salvation Army insurance)
Buy your own padlock - you can get a better, cheaper one elsewhere.

Start by choosing what you DEFINITELY want to keep.

And go from there.

At the end of the day it's the things that matter that matter.

Everything else is just 'stuff'.

Seeking extra information:

1. Do you own or rent the cottage?

1. Could you move to a bigger place?

In relation to keeping things that are memories- my mum had to downsize when we were small in a hurry. Quite morbidity, her friend told her to think “if I were to die in the morning would anyone know why I am keeping this?” and for each of us she got a box and put things into it for us. Once the box was full everything else had to go so she kept anything small that she could like little figures and some birthday cards but the big things had to go or the box would fill too quickly. It was lovely to get the box especially as she had kept a one or two of my favourite outfits but my sister is so unsentimental she binned the lot when she got hers.
Once we moved we had to keep a one thing in one thing out(ish) mentality because we just didn’t have room for things.
I think if she had got a storage unit, it would never have been cleared and if she had saved everything for me there I would have had to bin it anyway because I would have no where to put it all. It would have been such a waste of money.

You can absolutely rent a storage unit. Not insane at all. Do it if you need to.

But the effort to taking things to and fro and rootling through to find things is significant. Chances are you'll send all the stuff away for 6 months or a year, realise you didn't need it after all, and end up chucking nearly all of it.

Toddler toys, clothes and furniture should be fairly quick to tackle. Don't overthink it. And dump or Freecycle a lot of it - think of it that you are saving on storage so you can "spend" that storage budget on skipping reselling. Charity shop only the good stuff. If it's borderline, save the charity shop the effort and bin it.

Going back through the toys and clothes they will probably more fit for the tip than you thought. Our tip has a book bank that takes any resellable books - great and easy way to deal with books.

Why not commit one day to it - with plenty of breaks - and see how you get on before deciding about the unit?

I have already got rid of 1800 items this year so I'm getting rid of 180 items a week. But that's not fast enough to clear this room in a month. I thought I'd pack up the areas I still need to declutter. Plus all of her toys. Move her clothes into my room. Would need about 6 of the biggest packing boxes then once it's done, bring back a box a week which would fit back into my 180 items a month pace.

We had a storage unit before and did this years ago. Only had it for 6 months.

To clear the entire room fast I'd need to hire help and I'm not in good head space for that ( done this before, it's also very expensive).

How old is dd? Why do you need her old toys and clothes?

if the room is full presumably you aren’t using it. Do you need the furniture if it’s not being used?

perhaps start with those two groups. Keep one or two items if genuinely they have sentimental value and then get rid of all toys, clothes and furniture.

What would be left in the room outside those categories?

I appreciate you don't feel like you are in the headspace to deal with it right now but by packing it up and moving it all around to bring back and unpack again, you are effectively doing the job multiple times. The first time you pick an item up, if you sort it then it's gone and you don't have the deal with it down the line. Your way is still a huge amount of time - packing up and moving them will take time. You can do this. If those are toys and clothes from childhood then you don't need them. I say this as someone who struggles to let go. You will have memories of their use and you will have photos of them being used. You don't need the object. You can do it.

Just read your update. 180 items a month is great month on month. And as per my first point, if storage is what you need to do then do it.

Packing boxes are a great idea. Is there any mileage in getting the stuff into boxes and making a pile of them somewhere - in the corner of the dining room or in the room DS16 has moved out of? The great thing about packing boxes is they stack so you can get 3 or 4 boxes worth on the floorprint of a single box. Then it would still give you the mental space of using the boxes to compartmentalise the problem, without having the trips to the unit.

nobody needs this much stuff. Get rid.

be ruthless. It will do wonders for all of your mental health not being surrounded by so much crap.

Do you have any garden space that you could put a watertight shed in and use that because the storage unit will cost a fortune if it ends up taking a long time to process and it would also take less time to move all the stuff through to it?

Sorry about your son's mental health op. This must be a massive shock to you and I can see why it's hard to tackle clearing space for him when you're struggling too. You have already started decluttering which is great. It means your decluttering muscle is strong! It's not clear if your daughter still uses the toys and clothes in the downstairs room. It should be quite easy to get rid of them if not. I'd suggest focusing on that room and maybe your bedroom if you're going to have to move her clothes into there. Do your best to declutter with the option of packing any remaining stuff into boxes and putting it into storage at the end. Some charities will come and collect furniture if it's in good condition. Good luck!

Also you will be spending more on storage than the value of the contents very quickly so you could just put the money you would spend on storage into a bank account each month and use it to buy anything you find you need to replace (this is very unlikely to happen).

Seems like the storage unit is a bad idea. I might to have to ask ds not to bring most of his uni stuff home. He is hoping to try to go back next year but there's no room for his stuff except the loft and we have had a squirrel up there twice. There's no where else to store it. It was 4 extra boxes we bought from IKEA for him. They was in the living room until he moved out.

I guess we can put our dining table in the shed until moves back out and put his boxes there. As the dining table is in the living room.

The shed is watertight but we are rural so rats, mice etc I couldn't be sure it was safe for a year.

We stored stuff in plastic boxes (weighted down) and that was okay as long as there wasn't food in a non-mouse-proof outbuilding.

Do you use your dining table? If you could put it in the shed for a year without consequence then you could just sell it and save you the bother and space for storing it?

If it was me, I’d never clear the storage unit.

What category of stuff would be going in it? If it’s old toddler things then could they go to charity instead?

I know this might be more difficult if you're a hoarder, but I find the Kondo 'does it bring me joy' question helpful. It stops me focussing on 'what if I need this random thing in a year's time'.

Copy and pasting from another thread...
It depends how much you have to declutter and how rigorous /thoughtful you're going to be. Deciding what to get rid of is hard and somewhat negative. Try it from the reverse perspective - look at a drawer of babygrows /toys /kitchen utensils/books.... Tell yourself EVERYTHING is going out APART from the ones you decide to keep. Pull out the ones you want the most. This is enjoyable and positive. You'll get to a sweet spot when you think "enough" then what's left goes OUT.
Factor in time to get rid of the OUT pile, be it charity shop or bin

I really think that you probably don’t really need half of everything that you own. I would start clearing things with the view of taking things to the skip every other day, and/or taking things to the charity shop. And then, at the end of the process, if you still have boxes of things that you want/need to keep, then box those up and only then, hire a storage space. But for sure you don’t need to keep what you think you need. Does your daughter play with all of those toys all at once? I don’t think so. Just get rid.

No to a storage unit, a waste of money you will never empty the unit.
Dispose of the items in the room and spend the storage money on new items when the time comes.
Can you start with the. Invest items in the room ?
Either sell you dining table or ask BHF / a charity to come and collect it , alternatively give it away free to collector.
What is the next biggest item in the room?