Clutter can drain your energy, making your living space feel chaotic and less like a home. The push for minimalism isn’t just about keeping up with trends like Japandi or Tiny House living; it’s about reclaiming control over your environment. Achieving a calm, functional home often starts with letting go of unnecessary items—a task easier said than done.
Fortunately, embracing minimalism doesn’t mean giving up everything you own. Decluttering is a process, and storage can play a key role in helping you organise without permanent decisions. By safely storing possessions you’re not ready to part with, you can create the space to focus on what truly matters in your life while keeping options open for the future.
Contents
- Minimalism as an Aesthetic Choice
- Minimalism as a Logical Way to Organise
- The “Does it Spark Joy?” Decluttering Method
- Improve Living Spaces: A Decluttering Checklist
- Identifying Clutterblindness for Organised Homes
- Tiny Houses as an Alternative Housing Option
- Organise Your Home with Drive-Up Self Storage
Minimalism as an Aesthetic Choice
Minimalism, not the art movement but the trend of dispossessing possessions, has been popular in the last fifteen years. Interior decors like Japandi set the aesthetic tone for what is progressive. Japandi combines Scandinavian functionality with Japanese rustic minimalism.
This style evokes an aesthetic of natural simplicity and intelligent form. Clean lines, bright spaces, and light colours demonstrate the beauty of space, discouraging excess items and flourish. Japandi’s appeal goes hand in hand with the desire for eco and sustainable expressions of form and function.
To achieve the elements of this style, it is vital to emphasise only quality pieces of furniture and eliminate excessive items. For this, decluttering is key.
Minimalism as a Logical Way to Organise
You better understand how minimalism functions aesthetically, so let’s delve into a more practical consideration. While you may think it’s slightly bohemian or pretentious, there is a more logical way to perceive minimalism.
Reduce Clutter for a Functional Home
Essentially, you’re reducing clutter and creating a cleaner and more functional environment. Doing this opens up floor areas, making rooms feel more spacious and less cramped. You can lean into this by purchasing and using household storage products like bins, baskets, and organisers.
Use All Underused Spaces
Most homes have various underutilised “dead spaces.” Invest in clear plastic household containers to repurpose these empty voids for storage, such as under beds or on wardrobes. This simplifies daily living by making items easier to locate and access. Labelling the outside of boxes or containers also helps.
Better Living Spaces
As a logical approach, minimalism promotes better use of living areas, ensuring every corner has a purpose. It helps streamline decision-making by reducing visual and physical distractions while supporting a sense of calm and order in the home.
The “Does it Spark Joy?” Decluttering Method
The catchphrase of Mari Kondo’s popular cleaning and decluttering protocol, which has swept the world, asks objects to be evaluated by asking, “Does it spark Joy?” This method is applied to the contents of one’s home to remove objects that rank low on the joy index.
Here’s how you can apply this method:
- List each room in your home and decide what order you’ll choose.
- Go through each room and physically evaluate each item to see what your answer is to whether it sparks joy.
- Note your answers for each, and consider creating an inventory of your possessions as you go. This makes the exercise a win-win because you can catalogue everything.
- You can download a home inventory app to streamline the process and save your results with images.
- Keep the items that bring you joy, sell anything that still has value, and donate the rest to your local charity or upcycling collective.
- Anything that’s not in usable shape can be repurposed or recycled.
The end result is an apparent transformation of space and life as one becomes more aware of future object accumulation. Other enthusiasts of the movement have practised minimalism in Japan. The intention is to live only with minimal objects, prioritising furnished accommodation and reducing all product use and overall consumer practice.
Improve Living Spaces: A Decluttering Checklist
Let’s return to a more hands-on way of achieving your minimalistic exercise. This section will focus on how to approach the physical decluttering phase. Without further adieu, this is Aussie’s decluttering checklist:
- Start with one room: Focus on a single space to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
- Identify essentials: Keep only items that serve a purpose or bring genuine joy.
- Clear surfaces: Remove excessive decorations and prioritise open, clutter-free areas.
- Sort into categories: Create piles for keeping, donating, recycling, or discarding.
- Adopt the one-in, one-out rule: For every new item, remove one old or unused one.
- Utilise hidden storage: Use under-bed containers, baskets, and wardrobe top boxes for organisation.
- Rent a self storage unit. Consider this an extension of your home and an ace in the hole when decluttering.
- Rotate seasonal items: Store off-season clothing or décor to free up everyday space.
- Eliminate duplicates: Keep only one of each item type unless absolutely necessary.
- Prioritise quality over quantity: Choose fewer, better-made furniture and décor pieces.
- Reassess regularly: Make decluttering an ongoing habit to maintain serene living spaces.
We recommend setting a deadline for your decluttering task of around two weeks. This gives you enough time to balance the organising around your schedule while ensuring you don’t lose focus and interest.
Identifying Clutterblindness for Organised Homes
Clutter blindness, a term coined within the online extreme minimalist arena, refers to the insidious way that things build up. As the brain becomes familiar with the objects, it no longer registers their presence.
Five-Step “Clutterblind” Checklist:
- You are drowning in incomplete tasks and responsibilities. Clutter is not just material; it can be files on your desktop, unread emails, unpaid bills, and various duties swerved. Procrastination is clutter made manifest.
- You dread going home to your place and would rather be out than deal with all the unfinished business at home.
- Friends and family offer to help you clean up.
- You break things unnecessarily due to the chaos in your environment.
- Objects cannot be found just on command. You must turn your place upside down to see that letter, form, or key.
While these points seem a little evangelical on the extreme minimalist front, a sound organisational system can help your home life and psyche. If you use a storage container system, storing and itemising your stuff forces you to be honest about what you own and pay to store. People often find they need much less than they think, so that they may store unnecessary items for their new Tiny home, aesthetic re-vamp, new flat, or new house.
The result is being able to shed further items from the storage after completing the evaluation process. By minimising what is in your immediate surroundings and using a storage system to retain what you may need in the future, you can experiment with decluttering according to the needs of your life.
Tiny Houses as an Alternative Housing Option
An expression of a new synthesis of function, form, and affordability is the increase in popularity of tiny houses. The cost of homeownership plays a role in developing these niche homes. Still, they are usually examples of flair and creativity and, through their limited size, require a functional downsizin of general possessions. Tiny houses, if they keep within the required dimensions, generally do not need planning permission if they act as extensions of use of the current home or land they are on.
Obviously, stealth storage is required in the design, and additional storage from a storage company will be helpful, mainly if one is experimenting with living in a small space for the first time in a while. The beauty of having a storage container as a reserve for excess possessions is that you can experiment with what objects and items are essential.
Organise Your Home with Drive-Up Self Storage
If you are revising your living situation, coming to Bath to study, or looking for a temporary residence, consider our new drive-up self storage on Lower Bristol Road. Drive-up self storage makes loading and unloading easier. Confirm the permitted access times and arrangements for your booking.
We offer a variety of packages for business customers and personal storage. As affordability is high on our priority list, we charge less than the typical market rate. We can offer student storage and are happy to accommodate over-sized objects and unique needs. Ask about the unit conditions and prepare belongings carefully. Insulation alone does not guarantee that every material is suitable for storage.
So, if you are considering downsizing or experimenting with a minimalist outlook at a new stage in life, you don’t have to take the full plunge. Storage means you can lighten your load while preserving your options for the future.
Aussie Storage – Creating Better Living Spaces in Bath
We hope you find this blog helpful and are ready to consider how minimalism can improve your living spaces. While some methods may seem unusual, it’s worth reading more about them. The results could lead to a clutter-free, inviting home where you can reclaim lost rooms and feel more attached to your surroundings.
Aussie has the best storage facilities in Bath. Our range of services, including removals, allows us to collect your items from your doorstep and transport them to our storage depot. We prioritise excellent customer service with a robust internal quality policy to monitor our high standards. We are always happy to help, as our reviews and ratings on Google demonstrate. You can also read more tips on free storage and removal in our blog section here.
Click here to find out which of our storage packages will match your situation, and we’ll send you a free quote and details about the most suitable storage package.