Why is my house so messy?

Is your messy house driving you crazy in lockdown?

I don’t know about you but I have been spending an unhealthy amount of time, staring at the walls of my home during this latest extended lockdown in Sydney. There is no doubt it is a stressful time for so many of us, homeschooling children, isolation and worries and anxiety around a whole host of things.

Having a well functioning and uncluttered home is a major positive. With everyone at home working, three meals a day to be prepped plus a million snacks, it’s fair to say that my home looks like a bomb has hit it for large parts of the day. However at the end of the day, we can have everything tidied away and looking good in around 15 mins. This means it’s easier to relax in the evenings and when we start the next day, we do so with a certain level of calm.

But, it wasn’t always this way, in fact it was quite the opposite, my house felt constantly messy. We had accumulated years and years of stuff and every cupboard, wardrobe and shelf was full to overflowing. Things didn’t really have a logical place so when it came to tidy up time, things would just get pushed into piles or pushed into already jumbled cupboards.

I spent a lot of time trying to organise our things, I went out and bought fancy containers hoping these would finally solve my issue, but they didn’t! The containers just got jumbled and overflowing! We even resorted to moving house on more than one occasion just to get more space for our stuff, a lot of which we never used.

Disorganisation is rarely the issue…

But then came my aha moment……when I realised that we had way more stuff in our home than we needed.

Have you noticed that when you have an abundance of say plates in your kitchen, your children will always go to the drawer and look for a clean one, rather than washing one up? If you had less plates wouldn’t they have no choice but to wash up?

It’s the same with clothes, the more clothes a child has, the more they are likely to pull out on the floor until they find something to wear. Also they are more likely to choose to wear something newly washed rather than popping on the jeans they wore the day before.

Think about your own wardrobe, how much more work are you creating for yourself when you have items in it that you aren’t sure work for you but that you keep on trying on and procrastinating over. How much better would it be if it only contained the things that you loved and wore all the time?

Kids toys are a major headache, they have way more than they need or even play with. How much mess do they create when they tip out the toy box to find that one thing they love playing with. The weird reality is the less they have the more likely they are to play with them.

Recognising your ‘stuff’ issue is the first step in creating a more organised home

If you want your home to be calmer, more organised and less time consuming then you really need to address your ‘stuff’ issue first.

Systematically working through your home and taking it back to the basics of just the things you and your family need, use and love takes time and effort and can be an emotional process to go through.

I myself have been on this journey for some time now and there are still parts of my home that I haven’t yet tackled (the dreaded photo collection to name one!)

But I can tell you the rewards are so worth it, aside from the amount of time it has given us back in our day to day lives, our home really hums, we all know where everything belongs and there is a renewed sense of responsibility and sharing of the load.

And…..back to those beautiful containers…….when you have decluttered properly you can start to really curate your home to be a true reflection of you and your family….creating visual focal points (that would have been previously lost amongst your clutter) that make you feel happy, calm and relaxed.

So next time you find yourself looking for the latest organisation hack, or shopping for containers at KMART, stop for a moment and ask yourself, is this really an “organisation” issue, or is it a “stuff” issue?

Do you really want to get this done but just don’t have the time or headspace? Don't worry we can do this for you and you’ll be loving your decluttered and organised home in no time.