As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m currently in the process of decluttering and simplifying my life. I’ve come to realise that a big part of this is getting things organised, finding a home for every item so that it can be put away easily every time, and making sure things are close to where you need them.

I’m also a strong believer in being sustainable. This means that where ever possible I’m trying to reuse or find a new owner for the items we’ve identified as not needed. If possible I want to keep as much of the ‘stuff’ I’m removing through the decluttering process out of the trash can.

At the moment my focus is on decluttering our spare room where all my sewing stuff and our items that to date haven’t had a home are kept. I haven’t quite finished, but I’ve been organising all the secondhand/donated material that I have for my sewing projects. We’ve repurposed an Ikea cupboard from the living room to store my material neatly.

I’ve still got my suitcase of material from Christmas and a couple of bags of smaller/scrap material to sort through but so far I thing it looks great! Before this process the material was in about 6 different boxes and bags piles messily in the spare room, difficult to see what I actually had, and taking up at least a quarter of the room. When I’m finished the material will only take up as much room as that cupboard and I’ll be able to easily see what I have. The larger pieces of material are visible in the four open  cubes while all the smaller bits are folded neatly, tied with twine into colour groups and stored in the boxes within the other four cubes.

I’ve separated out quite a lot of scrap material that I don’t believe will be suitable for sewing. These I will be cutting into reasonable sized pieces, simply sewing around the edges to make sure they don’t frey, and turning them into cleaning cloths for around the house.

As part of making sure things are where they will be used I’m setting up 3 ‘cleaning sets’ that will have their own colour coded set of cloths and the natural cleaning supplies necessary to do the cleaning jobs in their designated area. There will be one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom/toilets, and one for the rest of the house that will live in the laundry.

Today I purchased the first few supplies.

I’m looking forward to setting this up in a way that will work for us. Given that we have the cleaners coming in to do the big clean fortnightly, at this stage the cleaning kits will mainly be used for the day to day wipe downs. The spray bottles will contain vinegar and I will be getting small containers of bicarb soda, as these two items combined forms the basis for most cleaning tasks.

Do you have a process in place that has simplified cleaning for you?

How have you organised your house to allow you to live a simplified or manageable lifestyle?