Introduction
If you have kids at home, your home can become a chaotic mess during the holiday season. And, although you can get used to navigating the jumble of Lego blocks and toys during this period, it is essential to declutter your home and organize everything once again as the new school year starts. Back-to-school decluttering can feel like an overwhelming task, and it makes sense to hire a helping hand to help you tackle the problem. You can simply search “cleaning services near me” to hire reputed professionals in your locality who can considerably reduce your workload.
However, if you are up for the challenge and like the task of organizing your house, we recommend you follow the proper guidelines to ease your workload. Here are a few back-to-school decluttering tricks you can follow:
Tips & Tricks
1. Perform a thorough deep cleaning of your house – Kids are lazy but creative. They can hide trash in hidden corners of their bedrooms if they don’t feel like getting up and disposing of things in their proper place. In fact, it is not uncommon to find tissues, chocolate bar wrappings, and bubble gum outside of the trash can in your kid’s room when you really look for them.
Thus, it is necessary to perform a deep cleaning of your house and get rid of junk before you start to organize everything. Pay special attention to the entryway and remove items that don’t belong in their designated place.
2. Organize the kid’s room and study space – Revamping the children’s room and organizing their study space is an essential step if you want to keep the clutter to a minimum, even after the school season starts. Thus, ensure you rearrange all the essential school items such as their books, homework notebooks, stationery, supplies, and other important items in their proper place.
It is a good idea to get a dedicated study desk if you don’t have one at home already since it will allow the older kids to keep things organized and ready for use on their own. Also, ensure the space is comfortable so that they can spend time in the study zone without any issues. It can also be turned into a study zone where they can do their homework without any distractions.
3. Decide which items to keep – Once you start to sort the clutter in your house, you will notice that there are a lot of stuff and items that you really don’t need. These could include items such as toys, gloves, balls, old books, old notebooks, artwork, and more. Now, you have to make a tough decision and decide which items to keep, sell, donate, or purge.
Generally, it is a good idea to keep old study books and notebooks since these can help your child review old curriculum whenever necessary. However, you can also decide to sell or donate the stuff if they are in appropriate condition. When it comes to the paperwork and artwork that the kids had to do over the years, it is best to get rid of the old stuff to keep a clean and tidy workspace.
4. Organize seasonal clothing – It is also necessary to organize the children’s wardrobe at the start of the new school year. The best way to do that is to organize the garments according to their use-case scenario and the different seasons. For instance, you can divide the sections into three categories — formal clothes, school clothes, and free-time clothes.
Also, inform them how to select their clothes for different occasions and purposes. This will ensure your kids can select the appropriate clothing on their own, even when you are busy with other tasks.
As the cooler weather approaches, you have to swap out summer clothes such as shorts and tanks into a different section for use next year. The main purpose is to declutter the wardrobe of seasonal clothes and prevent the area from getting cramped.
5. Declutter your home when kids are not present – Decluttering your home when children are present can be annoying and troublesome, especially if they don’t let you touch their stuff or disturb you while you are at work. Purging toys can be a little bit tricky since most kids form a deep emotional attachment to them, especially their favorite toys. In most cases, it is a good idea to decide which toys to discard together with your kids. Perhaps you can store a few toys if you have the extra space.
However, it is recommended you get rid of very old stuff, especially if it is broken or missing parts. If you notice that your kids don’t play with certain toys ever, but get upset if you want to discard them, you should probably throw them away secretly when they are not at home.
6. Prepare the kitchen area – Once school starts, you must have the kitchen ready and clean to allow you to prepare meals easily and without delay. Thus, it makes sense to organize the perishable and non-perishable items to make your morning routine much simpler. It is also a good idea to pre-package dry snacks or organize foods into fridge bins for making lunches.
Finally, ensure you create a dedicated snack drawer and fill it with healthy food items that your kids can turn to when they are feeling hungry.
Conclusion
Decluttering your home before the school season starts can seem like a tremendous job and it can be easy to get disheartened. However, you don’t have to do everything at once and it is much easier to get the job done if you start the work as early as possible. Disciplining your kids to not create a mess during the holiday period and encouraging them to keep their rooms neat and tidy also helps a lot. However, you can always search “cleaning services near me” on Google to hire a few extra helping hands if things get too tough for you and there is little time to get everything sorted and ready.