Life Improvement: Home Edition

Image from http://www.decibelmagazine.com

Hello everyone, I hope you had a nice Christmas and got what you were hoping for, luckily my boyfriend knows what a sad old codger I am and bought me a steam cleaner and I couldn’t be happier.

I was going to write something about new years resolutions, but lets face it, new years resolutions are trash. If you’re going to change your habits, you don’t need a reason to do so. (also, every time you tweet “New Year, New Me!”, a kitten dies.)

So instead, I’m going to offer you some advice and tips on how to maintain a tidy living space so you can get on with your life and not sit on top of a pile of dirty laundry refreshing reddit until your eyes fall out as per usual. Trust me, I’ve been there and nothing makes life harder than living in a tip, never being able to find anything.

Since a lot of you lovely readers will either be living at home or in student accommodation, I’m going to focus mainly on bedroom tidying tips and general stuff. Here we go!

1. Make your bed. Every darn day. Making your bed first thing starts your day off so right, and provides a handy deterrent to crawling back into bed for a nap around midday. It seems like such an insignificant thing, but it makes your bedroom look much tidier and who doesn’t want to get into a tidy bed at the end of day?

2. Pick an outfit the night before. This has been the single most revolutionary thing I have ever started doing. In the mornings, when its cold and you’ve got places to be, that five minutes of effort the night before pays off tenfold. Not having to go through drawers or washing piles looking for socks or a shirt, and not having to try on five different outfits because nothing looks right and you hate your clothes is such a blessing. It takes all the hassle out of getting dressed and because you chose that outfit when you were actually more than half awake, you will look better. It’s a game changer, I swear.

3.On the theme of laundry, an easy way to keep stuff looking neat is to invest in a laundry basket if you don’t already have one. You can pick up a cheap pop-up one at a pound shop. Again, it sounds so simple but not having dirty clothes on the floor and piled up on chairs is going to keep your room cleaner and tidier. If you want to be mega smooth, you can even put your cheap and cheerful laundry basket in the bottom of your wardrobe for extra tidiness. When the basket is full, wash your clothes and put them away as soon as they are out of the dryer. Piles of clean clothes might smell fresher than dirty ones but they still look as bad.

4. An oldie but a goodie. Have a place for everything, and put everything in its place. File away your lecture notes in a big folder, have storage boxes under your bed for stuff you don’t use regularly, keep your makeup and skincare if you use it in a basket or big zip up bag, have a space to put your bag and coat when you get home, don’t just dump them on the floor. Its old advice but it really does work. When you put things where they are supposed to go, you can always find them. Things stop going missing, you stop wasting time with dealing with piles of junk on every surface and ultimately you are a better person because you aren’t always low-level angry that you can never find anything.

It might sound like a lot of work, but I promise you, if you are fed up with living in a mess, utilizing these kind of daily tasks that realistically add up to maybe 15-20 minutes will fix a lot of things for you.

A final word, with the dreaded new years resolutions talk coming around, it’s important to remember that success means different things to different people. You’re gonna hear a lot of rubbish about how you need to be committing to lose 20 pounds, get a new job, get top grades and a new boyfriend and make 2014 a perfect year. Frankly, screw that noise, you’re a magnificent person in your own right and if you want to make some life changes, go right ahead but don’t let all the marketing blah blah surrounding new years make you feel like a failure before the year even starts.

Wow that was a long post! See you soon.