Time to clean up!
Mucking out the apartment – but now properly!
© tartan party / Brigitte
No excuses! With these tips you can easily muck out your apartment and clear out the kitchen, the children’s room or the basement.
The cupboards are bursting at the seams, the shelves are filling up and offer hardly any new storage space – it’s definitely time to clean up the old clutter and make room. We have tips for you on how to muck out your apartment and clear out the kitchen, the children’s room or the basement.
Mucking out: The basic program for everyone when clearing away old things
- Objective: Formulate a positive and as concrete as possible result that should be achieved with the clearing out, for example creating more space in the study. This makes cleaning up much easier.
- Motivation: Before cleaning out, let’s imagine what life, the basement, the desk will look like when you’ve done IT.
- Ultimatum: Get active no later than 72 hours after making your decision and start cleaning up. Really!
- Logistics: You don’t have to throw everything away. Some items belong in the junk category and are ballast, other cleared out items will be kept. Get a few boxes to sort: a trash can, a treasure box, a gift or flea market box, a repair box (about 2 euros in almost every home improvement store) or moving boxes. But remember: less is more ? (here you can find out everything about minimalism as a lifestyle).
- rule of thumb: What you haven’t used or needed for a year can go. But be careful: Important documents, for example for the tax office, must be kept for ten years.
- benefit: Facilities such as Caritas are happy about well-preserved things and are happy to pick them up by arrangement. On the internet you can about www.alles-und-umsonst.de get rid of almost everything – while avoiding waste.
- To dispose: Household goods and bulky waste are accepted free of charge in the municipal recycling depots. The bulky waste collection service costs between 0 and 40 euros, depending on the region. For hazardous waste such as paint and batteries, e.g. T. Fees charged.
- Reward: Even the space gained feels really good. A pair of shoes, a new handbag or a nice picture on the wall prolong the pleasant feeling. You deserve it.
The pair program – sorting out together
Opposites attract, and so it happens that a passionate keeper and a passionate one thrower to become a couple. He doesn’t want to part with anything that has even the smallest memory attached to it, she can hardly bear to see yesterday’s newspaper lying around somewhere.
Since throwing away is final, the throwaway has an advantage. Therefore, the collector should conjure up small treasures from his collection at regular intervals, which the throwaway had long thought were in the garbage, memorabilia from the beginning of the relationship, for example – the first postcard, the secretly stolen T-shirt that smelled so good of her, the movie ticket from the first date…
Out of sheer emotion, the throwaway will show understanding and be more merciful to the collector for a while.
Clearing out: order through methods
You don’t have to do everything in one day. Muck out your apartment step by step. Look for certain things or one or the other cupboard or room that needs order and then it’s time to learn to separate. Even if it sometimes hurts to clean up, it helps you get rid of the ballast. There are also helpful clean-up methods that make clearing out easier:
Video tip: Systematic tidying up