Welcoming a baby into your space as first time parents can be daunting, especially if you have a small home with limited storage space. Children are not only a lot of work but also require a lot of stuff. They quickly grow out of old clothes, shoes, toys, feeders and need new objects to be bought on a monthly basis.
The minute they start to walk, you will need to find a corner that’s big enough to park their walkers. The minute they are tall enough to climb out of their cots, you will need to install baby fences all over the house so that they can continue to play inside their room while you run errands and finish house chores. Therefore, it is very important that before the newest member of your family arrives, you de-clutter your home and create sufficient storage space for the child’s belongings, because with the child, you will always find yourself running out of storage space.
The idea is to have a minimalist approach and by throwing out or donating all unnecessary things, de-clutter your home in a manner where everything looks properly organized. Just buy and keep what you need, and not items you once thought you might need later.
Step No. 1: Sort Your Things
To de-clutter your home, the first thing that you have to be mindful of is to sort all your belongings. To do this, you can move from room to room and go through every single object that you own to find out what is an essential item and what are things that you can easily do away with.
For example; in the kitchen area, you may have still kept that old cooker that doesn’t work and is just gathering dust and rust in the cabinet below the sink. It is high time you throw it out because very soon you will find your baby crawling all the way into the cabinet and getting hold of that old and rusty cooker. And yes…babies love to lick everything. So, before your child makes it their business to restore that cooker to its former glory, using their saliva as the cleaning agent, please discard it.
The same goes for all the clothes that you don’t wear, all beauty products that are old and expired, and the electronic devices that are past their warranty periods and now sit in your storeroom as antiques, gathering dust.
Speaking of expired…the one thing that you must immediately take care of are expired medicines. Please make sure that you have thrown out all the expired medicines from your medicine box because while all medicines that are meant for adults will cause harm to babies, expired medicines could be fatal for them. So, do sort your medicine box as this will also create space for the medicines you might frequently need to administer to your baby.
Step No. 2: Label Everything
You will realize the importance of properly placed labels and tags when you hear your partner yelling from the kitchen and asking you what’s in the red jar that is on the second shelf of the middle cabinet on top of the stove.
You may be someone with strong visual prowess and can instantly answer back saying, “That is a pickle jar!” but a few days into being a new mother, barely managing 4 hours of sleep a day, trust me, the world will soon start to look dizzy and you will end up putting baby blankets in the dishwasher and feeders in the washing machine.
Labeling your boxes, containers, jars and bottles is a great way to find things immediately. It can save you from unnecessary stress, especially since now you will have limited time for all your work. Moreover, you can easily rely on your partner to find the right object or ingredient as you just have to instruct them to find the box labeled ‘wedding photos’ for instance.
Even if you decide to store all unnecessary items in the garage, basement or attic for a while, labeling the cardboard boxes will help you find the things that you are looking for fairly quickly.
Perhaps now would be a good time to rush to the nearby stationery shop and purchase a roll of tag tape.
Step No. 3: Organize a Garage Sale
You remember that time you were young, and after spring cleaning, your parents decided to have a garage sale to sell all the old furniture, electronic appliances, clothes and even your old comic books or Barbie dolls? Well, you are the parent now…soon to be. So now it’s your turn to spring clean your house and organize a garage sale in your front or back yard to sell all the unnecessary items that are occupying space in your home.
There is no better way to de-clutter your home than to hold a garage sale and profit from the things that you are thinking about throwing away anyway. As the saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
There are two ways that you can hold a garage sale. One is to, of course, do it physically outside your home by displaying all the items that you want to sell and putting price tags on them. You can invite neighbors, family and friends to have a look and see if they find anything worth buying.
Or, since this is the age of digital media, you could search for online pawn shops or pages that allow people to sell secondhand items and advertise your house-ware there.
In both cases, you might be able to earn a small revenue by selling off your old and unwanted belongings.
You will notice that once you de-clutter your home, organize the remaining furniture and household items, you will have more than enough space to accommodate your baby and all the objects that will find their way into your home with them.
In case you are planning to renovate your house for the arrival of your baby and need help dumping all the waste that now has no place in your minimalist home, feel free to contact us on +1 877-909-1001.