Look around your home and what do you see?
Maybe it’s beautiful furniture filling a farmhouse style living room. Poster beds with king sized mattresses rising high off the floor. A custom dining room table carefully adorned with specially ordered place settings. Walls lined with photos and artwork, carefully collected over the years.
Or maybe it’s a couple milk crates and a futon, to each their own.
What’s more than likely though is that you have more stuff than you even realized. How often do you open a closet and find something you don’t even remember buying?
How many electronics have piled up in the storage area waiting for VCR’s and tube TV’s to make a comeback?
Your closet is probably full of clothes that haven’t seen the light of day since Barack Obama was president and shoes that haven’t seen a New York City street in years.
Save your Money
If you’re planning an upcoming move, its best that you take the time to declutter your current home and thin out what you’ll be bringing along to the next house. Excess stuff will just cost you more money to pack, move, store and unload. Especially true if you’ll be hiring a professional mover, which we strongly recommend. Most pros charge per cubic foot, so more items mean more money.
Health Benefits
Outside of the financial reasons, clutter has some serious emotional and health consequences. And we’re not talking about hoarder house level clutter. Typical Americans have an abundance of knick knacks, papers, books, etc. that creates an environment of stress or claustrophobia.
Recent studies on the effect of everyday clutter in the home has shown that people experience increased anxiety, confused thought processes, poor visual processing and tend to eat more unhealthily when there is just too much stuff for the space they are in.
Your home is supposed to be your sanctuary from the outside world. When you walk in your front door, a feeling of peace and tranquility should be what you should experience; not feelings of being overwhelmed or like you can’t move without knocking something over.
Bypass the Excessive Packing
Building on the effects of stress, take a moment to consider that all those things that are filling your shelves and falling out of your closets will need to be organized, boxed up, labeled, loaded and unloaded when you move. Try to be honest with yourself when evaluating if you need or want something, if you haven’t used or noticed it in the last year, is it worth the time it will take to pack it properly when you move?
Free up Space for the Future
Look, it’s no secret that we as humans develop attachments to our “stuff”. We work hard and use our hard-earned dollars to buy these things over the years so the idea of throwing it away or donating It can be hard to accept. However, we must consider the future and understand that material items come and go, and that we’ll find plenty more over the next years of our life to fill that empty shelf space.
Do you, and your mental health a favor and declutter your home before you move and you’ll thank yourself for doing that.