10 Steps to Declutter Your Dubai Home By ServiceMarket.com

Your home should be a tidy and clutter-free place of comfort, where you can unwind and destress after a long day. Contrary to what you might think, it’s very easy to declutter your home, even if there are piles of papers, kids’ toys, clothes and random bits and pieces scattered around your living room. Just follow these 10 steps put together by the experts at ServiceMarket, the UAE’s leading online marketplace for cleaning and storage services, to make your home clutter-free and tidy.

1. First, set aside a day or weekend when you are free, and try not to postpone your decluttering session once you’ve made up your mind. If you can’t spare a whole day, then spend 15 minutes on decluttering every day until everything is done.
2. Have five boxes ready: one for items to sell, one for charity, one for everything you plan to keep in a storage unit, one for items you are ‘not sure’ about, and one for rubbish. Consider sorting everything else straight away.
3. Follow the “only touch each item once” rule. So many of us move things around and end up sorting them over and over. To avoid this, make sure that things go straight to the correct place or the correct box.
4. If you are not sure whether you need to keep an item then put it in the ‘not sure’ box and put those items away for a month or two, preferably in a storage unit in Dubai. If you haven’t used them by then then you don’t really need them.
5. Create files for your paperwork and put papers away as soon as you get them. Consider keeping multiple files: one for bills, one for warranty documents, and so on. Also, have one ‘intermediary file’ for papers that need to be dealt with (such as outstanding bills) and then move them to the correct file once you have done that.
6. When it comes to clothes, if they don’t fit or if you have not worn them in the past year, get rid of them. You could make money selling them online or at a school fair. Another option is to donate them to a charity (see step 9 for more details). You should consider keeping offseason clothes in a storage space to keep your closets cutter-free.
7. See how long you can go without buying food. Use everything up in your freezer and cupboards first. This can lead to some interesting dishes and save you some money on food shopping for a couple of weeks.
8. If you have children and they bring home lots of artwork try taking photos of each piece and saving them on the computer together. Add comments to remind you of how and when they were created. This will greatly reduce the piles of paintings that will usually end up being thrown away anyway after a while.
9. Once you have filled the boxes, you should take one or more of the following steps immediately:
   1. Donate items: There are donation banks all around Dubai where you can easily drop off unwanted clothes and other similar items. The Emirates Red Crescent is also an option for charitable donations.
   2. Sell items: You can easily sell items online on websites like Dubizzle and apps such as Melltoo.
   3. Store items: In addition to items like offseason clothes that you plan to keep in a storage unit in Dubai, you should also store things that are in the ‘not sure’ box as keeping them at home will only add to the clutter.
   4. Recycle items: Instead of just throwing away some of the items, consider options to recycle or refurbish them. There are many recycling points in and around Dubai where you can discard items like paper products and electronics. Another option is to give such items to Takemyjunk which can clear out junk such as old furniture from your home for free and put it to good use by refurbishing and then selling it.
10. Don’t buy anything new for at least a month, apart from essential groceries. This will help you understand how often you buy things you can live without.

Once you have decluttered your home, make sure you keep it that way by spending a few minutes each day putting items back in their right place. Here’s an additional tip for people with big families: create a “everything box” for each family member and keep that box by the door in their bedroom. Put any items that they leave hanging around in their box for them to sort out. If you have young children, you can turn this into a game. For every day they have an empty box and a clean room, award them a sticker, and then give them a treat for every 10 stickers they accumulate.

Be sure to book a cleaner to help you clean while you sort through your belongings. Nothing is better than coming home to a spotless and clean home.