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,

Top Ten Tidying & Decluttering Tips.

Happy Saturday my lovelies! I hope you’ve had a good week and are as happy as I am that payday has finally come for most of us! It’s this time of the month that I decide to do a bit of tidying up and get my space in order ready for the next month ahead.

I think we all have that one chair in our rooms that is the dumping ground for clothes and other things we can’t be bothered to put away during the week, and I am certainly no exception! At the start of the month my room is nice and tidy, but by the end of it it’s a complete mess and I’ll be feeling more stressed because of it.

This is why I’ve started tidying up every two weeks and decluttering at least once every two to three months to make sure I’m not gathering up unneeded clutter. (I struggle with OCD so I struggle to throw things away sometimes but it’s got better over the years).

So, today I figured I’d share with you my ten tips for tidying up your space so it’s actually liveable, rather than an instagram/pinterest bedroom because let’s face it, those are ridiculously unattainable in reality.

What I will say though, is that before you start decluttering and tidying your space, it’s actually a good idea to have a look on Pinterest for room inspiration which will make you much more motivated to start cleaning up your space!

Here’s my Pinterest board of room inspo:

So, onto my ten tips for a tidy space!

1 . Dedicate a specific date or time to tidy up and declutter. This can be once a month, every three months, even every week if you want; by decluttering regularly you’ll make sure you’ve got the space for the things you really need.

2 . Really take a look at what’s in your wardrobe and organise what you have by item. And try on everything you own and decide what actually makes you feel good.

Here you can see my wardrobe before and after decluttering and organising:

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3 . Get yourself some smart storage solutions. If you have loads of hair and beauty products and heat styling tools then I highly recommend picking yourself up a utility trolley! They’re great for holding all of the products and tools you need in one nicely organised place.

4 . Bookcases are great for storing more than books! If you have loads of shoes, using a bookcase for storage is a great solution to display your shoe collection and it makes deciding what shoes to wear so much easier because you can see all of your options!

Here’s my shoe collection! Safe to say I may have a bit of a shoe addiction!

5 . Give every item you own its own home. Whether it’s books, makeup, your glasses, everything in your room should have it’s own designated space.

6 . Try going minimalist for a few weeks. This may seem drastic, but if you box up all of your belongings only leaving out the bare essentials, you might find that you’re pretty content with what you’ve got and are feeling less stressed. And when you need something that you’ve put away in the box, you can get it out and find it it’s home.

I have done this twice now and it’s amazing what you can collect over time that you realise you never actually use. After a month or two of being minimalist, I often donate some of the things I don’t use and keep the sentimental items in their own box for safe keeping.

7 . Make your bed! We are a nation divided into ‘bed makers’ and ‘I’ll just be getting messing it up again later’ people. I am a firm believer of making your bed every morning, it just make your room look so much neater and cleaner.

8 . Get rid of unnecessary furniture. Have you got that one table that never gets used? What about a chair? I had a small coffee table that I couldn’t bear letting my mum get rid of but I never actually needed it, so that one had to go. And just like that, my room looked loads bigger already.

9 . Set aside a few moments at the end of the day to tidy away small items. This way the clutter and untidiness won’t creep back in!

10 . Finally, put on some music or a film whilst you declutter! It’s always much more fun when you can sing and dance along to some tunes whilst you get down to tidying!

And those are my top ten tips for decluttering and tidying up your space! Having a clean and decluttered room always makes me feel relaxed and calm. How do you like your space to look? Have you got a particular aesthetic that you like? Let me know in the comments!

Have a great weekend my lovelies!

Love,