Summer Decluttering.

Happy Saturday my lovelies! I hope you’ve had a great week and a lovely pride month so far. June has been a really busy month for me, for a range of reasons, one being that I finally got myself a new car, work has been crazy busy, I’ve been going out more and because I had to do a complete overhaul on my tiny bedroom.

Which brings me onto what today’s post is, why I had to declutter my room, how I did it and what my room looks like now!

So, why did I end up decluttering my bedroom?

Well, let me take you back to about 3 weeks ago.. I woke up to find a teeny tiny bug on my phone, and at the time I thought nothing of it because it’s summer and I’d had my window open a fair bit and I also have a lot of indoor plants so I know every now and again you can get a bug or two.

Fast forward to about two days later and I’m finding the little buggers everywhere. So, I looked up what they were and it turns out they were carpet bugs!! Sadly they can come in through the window, through indoor plant soil and a few other ways. I’m not 100% sure how they got into my room but I’m guessing it’s probably through my window.

After finding the bugs I took the day off work and decided to do a deep clean because there wasn’t a chance I was going to be able to stay in my room without feeling like I’m being crawled over and eaten alive haha. I cannot stand bugs. So, I decided to begin the deep clean and declutter of my room by throwing away all of my bedding (I needed to get some new pillows, a duvet and bedding set anyway) because the bugs can live in them, I then got one of those shake n’ vac carpet and fabric cleaners and cleaned my mattress so I could then move that into another room and begin clearing everything else out!

Skipping to after clearing the majority of my furniture out of my room after being scrubbed down and cleaned, I then started my decluttering process. My strategy for the decluttering process was kind of like Marie Kondo on steroids, I kind of went by the below sorting tree and was pretty ruthless:

You can download it here!

In the end I threw away and donated about 70% of what I owned, and that was mostly because I didn’t even realise I owned that amount of stuff. You see, a big part of my OCD is hoarding, so without always realising it I had collected a huge amount of stuff that I didn’t need. I can’t stop myself from buying everything related a new passion or hobby; and then I’ll move onto a new one and then completely forget I bought a load of stuff. I also struggle with object permanence when I need certain things and end up rebuying stuff all the time, a perfect example of this is that I own around 7 of the exact same black t-shirts because I keep forgetting I own them.

Anyway, back to what happened after moving all my furniture out and getting rid of a load of stuff. I started to deep clean my carpets and areas where carpet bugs can live, and whilst doing this I found the nest of them, which wasn’t actually any of the places where I had deep cleaned.. they had had about 100 babies in the corner of the ceiling in my room!! So the horrible thing was that they had been slowly making their way across my ceiling and falling down on everything. It still gives me the heeby-jeebies. Well, after finding that and getting rid of those the drama still wasn’t over.. because a bird decided to fly into my room and go absolutely nuts. Now, it was then that I realised that I have a fear of birds and proceeded to run as fast as I could out of my room at which point my incredible mum spent the next hour trying to get this little bird out of my room because it kept missing the window out and getting stuck around some of the furniture I had moved back in. Luckily she managed to get it out and it was completely unharmed in the end.

So, with the bird gone, bugs gone and any form or dust and dirt gone I finished moving everything back into my room. I picked up some new pillows, a new duvet, bedding set and got rid of my curtains for a cute bamboo blind (I love waking up to natural light so this is perfect for me). And I have to say, now that I’ve gotten rid of a huge amount of possessions (I kept mostly art supplies because I can’t bare to part with them) I feel absolutely amazing and refreshed; not to mention that my room looks so much bigger and lighter. Along with my room looking better, I also think it’s helped get rid of some stress that I hadn’t realised had built up from my surroundings.

Now that you’ve heard about how my room used to be (fortunately and unfortunately I haven’t got any before pictures because I forgot to take any), here’s what it looks like now!

It’s still kind of funny to me that in the span on 2-3 photos you can see my entire bedroom, the only thing I’ve not got a photo of is my desk, but that’s just a standard desk, nothing too pretty or exciting about that. My top three favourite things about my bedroom now are how airy it feels (I think having nothing above my wardrobe helps with that a lot), my new blinds that also open up the room a lot more than my curtains did and finally my new bedding because not only is it cute and light, but it’s also super soft and comfy. Now that I’ve deep cleaned and decluttered I feel like it’s a refresh and restart and I fully intend to keep my room this way in the future.

When was the last time you decluttered? How did it make you feel afterwards? Let me know in the comments!

And with that, I will leave all you lovely people with a photo of a very cute purchase I made last week, a plant pal called Mabel from Ocean Hughes which now lives with Barry – my bonsai tree!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and pride month my lovelies!

Love,

I Moved Into A Tiny Room.

Hello my lovelies! I hope you’re having a good Saturday and weekend so far and are staying safe if you’re venturing outside social distancing. It seems weird that everything is very slowly feeling a bit like we’re getting back to what normal used to be, but it’s refreshing being able to have a bit more freedom. (That being said, I’ve still not left my house even with the lockdown restrictions being loosened a bit!). Speaking of refreshing, over the last two weeks I’ve had a big change of scenery; and all of this happened because of a conversation with my younger brother.

You see, I still live at home because I’m saving to buy my own place in a few years (thanks UK house prices..) and because I’m the oldest of the three of us that are still living at home, I have the biggest room out of the three of us, with my youngest sister (13) having the next biggest and the my younger brother (17) having the smallest because he’s never had a lot of stuff or need for a bigger room. Well, my brother asks me quite a lot about when I will be moving out because he is desperate to have my bedroom and long story short, I was feeling generous and decided to just left him have it since he’s never had a big room before and he is going on 6ft+ so he needs the leg room at the end of his bed at the very least haha.

The look of shock on his face when I said to him lets just switch rooms was absolutely priceless.

Then the next day came along and it was decided that we desperately needed to paint my brothers room in prep for me moving in. So, we spent the entire day taking everything off of the walls and filling in all of the holes ready for painting the room white to give it a new lease of life and brighten it up. That evening I had to start going through everything in my room and have a big clear out, because even though I’ve paired my belongings down dramatically over the last few years to combat my hoarding tendencies (thanks ocd! Haha) I still had a lot I needed to go through in order to fit everything into a tiny room.

I’ll be honest, I completely forgot to take really any photos of the process which was my bad, but the day after filling all of the holes my brother and I moved everything out of his room except his bed (incase we didn’t get everything done that day) and then I painted the entire room white which really brightened it up and gave it a nice refreshing look. Then that evening once the paint was dry we managed to move all of the furniture out of each others rooms and into our new spaces.

So, although I completely forgot to take before pictures of my brothers room, and during the painting process, and my room beforehand, I have dug out some old photos where you can see small parts of what my room was like before and during!

Here’s what we were dealing with before:

So those are before my I moved rooms, now here’s for the small number of photos I took during(thanks to my brother Joe for the shaky camera shot – at least it’s something from during the process!). And for reference, my old room is probably three times the size of this one with slanted walls on one side:

And finally, here’s what my room looks like now that I’m all moved in! It’s super small, but I love it and it is so refreshing to be in a new space and it’s super cosy and light!

As you can see from the photo I took from above, the room really is pretty small! And as you can see there isn’t a huge amount of storage in my room, close to none really, except a short gap under my bed; so by changing rooms I’ve had to go pretty minimalist compared to what I used to be like. I’ve decluttered and tried to go minimalist a couple of times in the past, but somehow the clutter always begins to build up again after a few months. So this is a great opportunity for me to really commit to the minimalist lifestyle.

Now I’m two weeks into living in this new room and I can safely say that I absolutely love being in this smaller room, it feels exactly like the kind of reset I needed. And it’s so nice to have a simply shaped room! My old room was a disjointed ‘L’ shape with parts taken in and out of it with slanted walls across the longest side so low you couldn’t use it! But my brother loves his room and loves the weird walls too! And lucky for me, I now don’t get asked ‘When are you moving out?!’ 5 times a week.

My family have no idea how I’ve managed to make my teeny tiny room cute, cosy and appear weirdly bigger than how my brother had it, but they think it’s a great fit for me too and love how I’ve decorated it.

I have to favourite parts of my room, number one – my windowsill. Weird I know, but in my last room I didn’t actually have a windowsill, not sure why, but I didn’t. Plus, I’ve made myself a little succulent and cacti garden with my incense burner, buddha and crystals, which I find so calming and relaxing to look at. These succulents and cacti were less that £10 in total from B&Q for anyone who’s wondering – bargain!

My second favourite part of my room, is my wall art. My walls are completely covered in art and it just brings a smile to my face. I love art, and I love being creative and it’s such a great way to express yourself. I’m currently working out what other images and artwork I want to add onto my picture wall so if you have any ideas or recommendations let me know in the comments or tag me on insta @theweightofmyworlds!

So, what do you think of my new room? How do you like to decorate your space? Let me know or show me your spaces on insta or twitter, I love interacting with you on there! Now that you’ve seen my new space in my tiny room, I’ll leave you with these photos of me and my brother Joe! Can you guess how tall I am?! Hahaha!

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Have a great weekend my lovelies! Stay safe and look after yourselves!

Lots of love,

Into