6 Simple Ways to Declutter Your Home Before a Redesign

Planning a home redesign is always exciting, and no doubt your head is swirling with ideas based on colour swatches and furniture rearranging. But before you do that, there is one important step you should take: decluttering.

Clutter makes it hard to visualise a new layout, choose the right colours, or even feel a sense of calmness within your space. 

Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you're updating one room or doing a full renovation, it makes sense to clear out the jumble first to make everything go smoother. 

But how do you go about doing that effectively?

Here are six simple ways you can declutter your home before jumping into your next big interior project.

Call In Expert Rubbish Removalists

Before we touch upon the ways in which you can declutter your home, it's worth pointing out what you can do with the excess.

Ideally, you should try and sell what you don’t want or donate as many items as you can to charity. However, if you have a big cleanout on your hands and plenty of old furniture, broken appliances, and various knick-knacks that have seen better days, you should consider calling in expert rubbish removalists to get rid of it responsibly for you.

The best companies will take care of the heavy lifting and remove everything quickly, which will save you a lot of time and hassle. When choosing one, make sure you get a quote in full and check out the reviews they have received from other customers online.

Simple Ways To Declutter Your Home

Before you can engage the services of a company to responsibly remove the rubbish from your home, you are going to need to declutter it.

Here are some of the best ways you can do that.

1. Tackle One Room At A Time

Trying to declutter the entire house in a day is a recipe for stress, frustration, and an incomplete job. That is why you would be better off adopting a room-by-room process.

Start with the area you plan to redesign first. This is where your real passion and focus lie, so doing this will help to build momentum. Be sure to focus on what you use, what you love, and what serves a purpose in that space.

Once you have done that, carry on through the rest of the rooms in your home on a strategic basis. Doing this will help to keep things manageable and enable you to better understand your progress.

2. Use The “Keep, Donate, Toss” Method

As touched upon earlier, one of the golden rules of decluttering is to place your possessions into one of three categories: keep, donate, and toss.

When going through your stuff, you should be ruthless and honest about what you actually use. If you haven’t touched that vase in three years, try to sell it or donate it to charity. If you have a portable stereo that no longer works, send it to the dump.

This method is great for sorting out shelves, drawers, and storage units. It is also a quick way to declutter your living space without feeling overwhelmed.

You can sell your unwanted items on platforms like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Etsy. Alternatively, you can run a market stall. For charitable donations, you can use a site like GIVIT.

3. Get Ruthless With Your Storage Areas

Before redesigning, take a look inside your cupboards, wardrobes, and under-bed storage. These spots are often bursting with forgotten items and can be better employed storing things you actually use or need.

Use stackable storage boxes or drawer organisers as they will help keep things tidy in the long term.

4. Declutter Your Walls, Too

Sometimes it is harder to notice. But walls can get just as cluttered as floors and surfaces. 

Often, they are full of mismatched art, outdated photos, or hooks holding things you no longer use. So, before your home redesign, consider stripping the walls bare.

Doing this will give you a clean slate and help you visualise a new layout without distractions. It’s also a great time to patch up any holes or marks in preparation for a fresh coat of paint. Here are some tips on how you can do that.

5. Keep Only What Fits Your Design Vision

You might love that armchair and spend hours every week relaxing in it and watching Netflix. But will it suit your new aesthetic?

Part of decluttering is to think ahead. In other words, only keep what will work in your future setup.

If you’re not sure, it is worth setting those items aside (preferably in outside storage), so as not to clutter your living space and decide after your new interior design preparation has been completed.

6. Stay Focused On Functionality

Aside from making things nicer and clearer, the goal of decluttering before a redesign is to build a home that works for you. Therefore, it is important to think about how each room needs to function.

For instance, is there enough walking space? Are the surfaces clear? Can you find everything easily?

When you design in this way with functionality in mind, you’ll create a space that not only looks good but at feels great to live in.