How to tidy, declutter and make your home cosy

Preparing for Winter can be really tricky sometimes, but getting help from a professional declutterer like Lizzie Grant is a great way of finding some new ideas on how to tidy, declutter and make your home cosy this Winter. Just a 20 minute FaceTime chat with Lizzie and I soon had some great ideas on how to keep the children’s bedrooms tidy.

Lizzie owns Simplify Stuff which is ecologically friendly and encourages clients not to simply throw things away but instead to recycle or donate unwanted possessions to charities and not-for-profit organisations. Advice is also given to clients as to which of their unwanted possessions could potentially be sold and the best places to sell these items online or elsewhere if desired. 

Lizzie’s declutter advice

So, Isla’s room was a complete mess. It looked like this when I Face-timed Lizzie (embarrassing):

Lizzie assured me she had seen worse, but I am sure she was just being polite. The advice Lizzie gave seemed perfect, and also I felt a little silly with myself for not thinking about it sooner. Sometimes it takes someone outside of the situation to help you the most.

The 5 tips are:

Organise the storage with drawer tidies so that Isla can put things into the right place. Instead of toys all being thrown into one large drawer. Which means to play with these toys you have to sort through or simply they get ignored. I thought this was a genius idea and we had tubs for storage so I separated the toys up into the tubs and put them in the drawers – very organised.

Rotate the toys, especially soft toys, we used to do this when the children were younger and stopped. I am not sure why we did. I love this idea. Toys that they got a few years ago tend to get forgotten about this time of year when Christmas is approaching, phases have passed or the new thing is something different. Hiding them away means the kids forget about them, then are happy when reunited with them.

Pack up toys for charity donations. This is something I say I am going to do every week and I forget. Isla has 90 million soft toys in her bedroom and she doesn’t play with them all, she has a selection that she plays with. I am going to make a decision that toys that haven’t been played with for at least 3 years will be given to charity this Christmas. Before Christmas too so other children can benefit from them.

Label the drawers. I loved this idea. I have my Cricut machine and a Dymo label maker. So I had fun making labels for their storage. This helps Isla to understand where things need to go too. I did it for the kitchen cupboards too! It was quite therapeutic.

Make it easy for Isla to play with her toys. This is something I over look quite a lot. If Isla cannot find her toys, get to her toys or put them away quickly then she quite simply will not. So by reducing toys and labeling spaces it will make Isla have more control of her room. Which means she will take ownership of it.

I took all of these ideas and applied it to Noah’s room too. I moved his furniture around to make the best of the space and tidied up all the toys. He loves his new, tidy, room and is finding it much easier to keep clean. YIPPEE.

What room would you ask Lizzie to declutter if you could? It was such a breath of fresh air talking to Lizzie, no judgement and some fabulous ideas on how to utilise the space we have.