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Episode 239 – How do I fall back in love with my house

We come across so many people who have fallen out of love with their home and are on the verge of moving or taking drastic action. But sometimes it’s not the home itself, it’s the clutter that resides there. In this podcast we are going to talk about what you can do to fall back in love with your home again.
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Transcript of this podcast episode
[00:00:00] Ingrid: We come across so many people who have fallen out of love with their home and are ready to take drastic action. But sometimes it's not the home itself. It's all the clutter that resides there. In this podcast, we're going to talk about what you can do to fall in love with your home again.

[00:00:22] Voiceover: You are listening to the Declutter Hub podcast, bringing you tried and tested no nonsense tips and advice from the leading in decluttering and organising your home. Now here are your hosts, Ingrid Jansen and Lesley Spellman.

[00:00:53] Ingrid: Hello and welcome listeners. I'm Ingrid. And I'm Lesley. If you're new to the Declutter Hub podcast, you are so welcome. What you'll find is that we try and find a fun factor in the serious business of decluttering, and if you've been here for a while, you know exactly what we mean. So thank you so much for listening.

[00:01:13] Lesley: If you'd like to get involved in conversations relating to this podcast, it all takes place in our Facebook group. So come and join our lovely, warm, supportive community. To find the Facebook group, go to declutterhub.com/group to find out more, or you can search for the Declutter Hub community on Facebook.

Now before we get started, Ingrid, we wanted to do a little extra feature in our podcast, and we're going to get started today because what we are realising, we have so many lovely people who either leave us reviews on the podcast or send us emails about various bits and bobs and we never really talk about them, do we?

So, as part of the podcast, what we want to do is talk about the things that you send us. I think that'd be quite interesting. And we had a fantastic one this week, didn't we, Ingrid? From Verle from Canada, who gave us a little bit of love because she has noticed that we have started to transcribe our podcast. Ingrid what does that mean?

Yes. So basically in the past you can only listen to us. Then you could listen to us and you could see us on YouTube. And now we're also making a transcription of the podcast so you can read everything that we can say. Oh, I hope that, well, apparently it's a good thing, Lesley, but...

I think it's out there. I don't know, it's a little bit front and center, isn't it? The transcription, who knows what might be there captured for posterity. I just feel like, you know, talking's a little bit more fluid. Transcription just feels a little bit more permanent, doesn't it really? But yeah, obviously it's very, very important from an accessibility perspective and it's something that we've wanted to do for a while, honestly. Technology has meant that it's been very, very, prescriptive for us, are very expensive for us to do, but suddenly something's come up, which makes it achievable then for us to do. And so we're on it. So our, our latest podcasts have all been transcribed and we are working slowly but surely back into the archive, to trans, to trans, it's a bit of a, uh, mouthful isn't it, to transcribe all of our previous podcasts. So watch this space. So thank you so much to Verle cause she said thank you for just transcribing the podcast. Even with hearing aids, I now need closed captioning and I can read more comfortably than I can listen. We are delighted, Verle, and thank you so much for letting us know.

Yes. Yeah, very, very nice as well, and talking about these lovely comments from Verle. If you want to say something or share something about our podcast, don't forget to leave us a review in your podcast player. You can normally, wherever you're listening, you can either give us, um, thumbs up or stars or you can actually leave us a review and we can read your wonderful comments.

And maybe you'll be featured on this podcast as well.

And it makes a massive difference as well, you know, doesn't it? It makes a big difference to our podcast and to, I mean the success of our podcast, but that's not really what it's all about. It's about sharing our expertise with all the people and the more people hopefully that we can help the better. So yeah, keep those reviews coming. 

So Ingrid today we're going to talk about falling out of love with your home. And it's a big one actually, and people are like, oh, you know, sometimes when we say that to people, cause that's something that we talk about quite a lot because we can see that people kind of down in the doldrums a little bit about their home when it is overwhelmed with clutter. So we wanted to talk a little bit more about how we can fall back in love with our house, didn't we?

Yeah, I think it's such an, uh, a good talking to talk about, because I think what we hear a lot is like, I just need to, you know, put everything in a skip or I'm just going to throw everything away, or I need a bigger house, or I'm going to move, or anything like that. And it's like, wow, they're, we can conclude they're not happy in their current house. The, the, the person is, she's not happy where they are and it's, I can really make a person feel down. I mean, your home is your safe space, isn't it? It's the place where you relax after a busy day or when you, you have had, you know, lots going on at work or in your personal home or with your health. Your home has to be the place where you think ahh, but when you're completely, almost angry and disappointed at your house. That's not really helping with the whole soothing and relaxation is it?

I know exactly. I think, I think what we find quite a lot, so it is, it is an interesting one. So from a, on a personal level, in my kind of one-to-one business, the Clutter Fairy, we often go to people who ask us to declutter their homes. Kind of almost like a home staging scenario. So it's like a need to move house. I need to get my house looking at its best, so therefore can you come in and help to declutter? Which to be fair is kind of a little bit of a strange idea, because what we're doing is we're putting somebody else before ourselves because if we believe that our home can look its best without the clutter, why have we not done that for ourselves? And so we live with all the clutter, but it's only when somebody else, we want to kind of present it to somebody else that we get stuck in and, and get rid of some of those things that are not serving us well or make us feel a little bit down or not showing the house off at it's best and what quite often happens, Ingrid, is that, honestly, this has happened on several occasions. Once we've done that process, and we're going to talk a little bit more about what that then leads into later, people are like, actually, I remember what I loved about this house the day that I bought it 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Because at some point you did love your home. We all know that feeling when we find that home and we are, oh, this is the home for me. I love. And you're kind of quite obsessed by the house at first, aren't you? It's very exciting. It's very new, it's very special. So at some point you absolutely loved your home, but for one reason or another, and some of that is definitely clutter related, we have fallen out of love with it. So we are on a mission to get people to fall back in love with our current homes, save themselves a whole load of money moving, putting an extension on, getting redecoration done, all those kind of things, and, um, fall back in love with our home again.

Yeah, because I know, I know one thing for certain Lesley moving to a larger house because you think your current house is too small because there's too much clutter moving to a larger property is 9 out 10 times not the answer to your problem. I've seen it. I've had clients of mine have moved to a larger house and the clutter is still there because they just move to more, more space and more stuff.

But the clutter has just, they're just not more clutter than there was before because you just never gotten around to actually going through the clutter. And it can really, really, um, have a massive impact on people's moods isn't it?

I think it's important to evaluate. If you do feel that you want to upsize, then, what's the reason for that. And of course there are many, many valid reasons why we do that. You know, we've got a bigger family, we've got people coming to stay. We work from home now. We have more money so we can afford a bigger property.

So there's lots of reasons why we have that. But one of the reasons why we shouldn't do that, as we say, is because we need more space to house our clutter. That's never a good idea. We just, it's, it's the same principle, Ingrid as, as. Buying storage. You know, we talk about leaving the storage to last, don't we, all the time?

Because we find 9 times out of 10 that there's already more than ample storage in a property. It's just that there's too much stuff. And so once you start to get rid of the stuff that you no longer need or that is no longer serving you in your current life, actually, you unveil all this fantastic storage that you bought in days gone by all these wardrobes, or built in cupboards that have kind of been uh, crammed to the rafters.

And everything's good. And so I think it's about taking a step back and realising that sometimes that kind of dejected feeling that we have is about the clutter and it's not about the house. And that's what today's all about, isn't it?

Yeah. I think also I think. You want to see the potential of your own house again, right? You just want to go, oh, thi this house does have the right storage. I just indeed have too much clutter. Or, I'm not using the storage that is in this house in the right way. The wrong things are in the wrong places, but you know, trying to move house or, or building an extension, on the kitchen or extend your loft, or transform your loft into a bedroom, or whatever it is, those are expensive solutions.

While indeed tackling some of that clutter, it can really, really help a long way to kind of go, hold on a minute. This is actually a fantastic house. I just haven't seen it for a while.

I know, I mean, when, uh, a few years ago, um, Trying to think how long it was. Um, I did a talk, um, and a kind of expert session at the Ideal Home Show and it was all about, you know, how decluttering is the cheapest home improvement you can ever make. And we really stand behind that, don't we, because actually decluttering never costs you money and all the other home improvements kind of typically do.

And so, It's important to recognise that you can make this, these big inroads into your house without actually spending any money and act, to be fair, you might even recoup some money. You know, if it's really valuable stuff that you can sell, um, then you might even be able to recoup some money. Definitely a win-win situation.

So we've talked about the fact that it's overwhelming and that we, we might want to move house, take drastic action, and that's not always a good thing. I think there is also an element of frustration. It's kind of a blame thing, isn't it? We want to blame someone for the emotions that we feel and we blame our homes, you know, this kind of bricks and mortar, and we blame it for not being suitable.

It's kind of weird, isn't it, when you think about it, because we're so frustrated with it that we, we have very negative emotions and reactions to the staff because we're very frustrated.

Yeah, I think so. I think it's like, We just want to go, oh, well I just don't have enough space and that's not my fault. This house just doesn't have the right cupboards. Or, my previous flat had more cupboards than this house currently has. Or, um, my family has grown so much and, and they've brought all this stuff with them and I've been given so much things.

So it's like, but we are in charge of our clutter, aren't we? We are in charge of our stuff. We are the ones who can change that. We can't blame the house for not having enough cupboards, you know?

And I think there's an element of realism needed. And this is hard sometimes because honestly, Ingrid, you can sit here and say, well, you just have, you know, you have whatever you know is dealt to you in terms of whether you live in a, um, you know, a shared student room or a six bedroom detached property.

You, as you say, Ingrid, you make your own decisions about the stuff that you've got in there. And those decisions are different. You know, the bottom line is, the reality is if you've got a bigger house, you can have more stuff. You can have more stuff. And live perfectly functionally, uh, find organisationally everything that you need. Put more storage in there, make it all look beautiful. You've got a little bit more space to breathe if you do have a studio flat or a shared room or whatever, or a smaller property. That's what you've got. And no amount of kind of, you know, being jealous or moaning. Cause we do get that. We get people who are like, it's all right for them.

They've got such and such a thing. But that's life, isn't it? Some people got more money, some people got bigger houses, some people have got things that we all want, but we just, that's the hand that we've been dealt unfortunately. And so we just have to work out how we can make the most of that. And decluttering is always a positive thing. And now I know you wanted to talk a little bit about cleaning, didn't you, Ingrid? Cause you, you are a little bit of a queen of clean.

Yeah, I do like it. And I think the thing is, what I see a lot as well is that when there's a lot of clutter, the chores, like cleaning, like maintenance, small repairs, all of those things kind of get put on the back burner a lot because it gets really hard work, especially if there's a lot of co clutter. But even if it's there a little bit of clutter, you know, and that what, what we see in a membership as well, the, the, the members who are decluttering going, oh my gosh, it's so much easier now to wipe the sides down in the kitchen. To dust my living room down because there's just less stuff around.

So all my other chores that I need to do on a daily and weekly basis are getting easier and the clutter lots of times prevents a, a, a small job that should not take very long. It suddenly becomes a very long job because it, it's just much more work to do everything. And I think that's also really a, a big downside of having lots of clutter, that the cleaning and the maintaining is more tricky, so it gets less done.

So that doesn't help when you're already kind of falling out of your house because it, it gets a little bit dirty and a little bit, you know, there's, there's cobwebs and there's dust and there's broken something and there's something that hasn't been painted in ages because everything, all of those chores take so much work to do that you're putting it off and then the dirtier it gets, the less appealing your house looks, the more out of luck you fall with it. It's, it's lit's a vicious circle.

Yeah, is, and I think as well as the fact that it's difficult to clean, um, When you've got a lot of stuff, the transformation that you see. So if I, if I spend four or five hours cleaning my house from top to bottom because there's no clutter, I can see it gleaming. You know, so I can see the transformation that kind of justifies the effort that I've put into it by cleaning it, because there's no clutter.

So all my work surfaces are clean. I can see them shiny, you know, it's right. You know, even though my house is just as tidy from a, a kind of, you know, Monday to Fri, Friday to a Friday, normally do my cleaning on the weekends. I can see when it's being cleaned. I can smell when it's being cleaned. I can see when it's being cleaned and I can also see things that need cleaning, extra cleaning.

Do you know what I mean? So I think there's a bit of that. But if you can't see that transformation, so if you suddenly spend five, six hours going top to bottom on your house, and what you see as a result of that is just the clutter and not the gleaming surfaces. Then you can understand why people are like, well, I'm not even going to bother, because literally it doesn't look any different.

Do you know what I mean? So that's the, that's the problem. Is this vicious, circling with that, like you say, of kind of what's the point? Yeah, and the same with the clutter is like, you know, if you've got a lot of it everywhere, what's the point in doing that small area, because I've got all of this to do as well.

And so we're not saying it's easy, far from it, as you know, with decluttering, but what we are saying is these are the reasons why we blame our homes for not being good enough. It's almost like it becomes like, a human being almost, isn't it? We're like, my house is just not good enough. I hate my house. You know, we hear it all the time, don't we? But the nice thing Ingrid, is we also see the after. And so we also see the difference that it makes. You know that, that feeling, that taking stuff to the charity shop, taking stuff to the recycling, coming into a clear property. We've all seen before and after pictures. We know what transformational journeys look like, and we know how happy it makes us feel.

And so that's what's important. And then we kind of go, oh, actually. I love this room and I, and I can see I've opened the curtains and I can see the sun shining through and I can use it again for its purpose. And actually that unloved room that was a dumping ground has come back into my life again. And I love it.

And I see the benefits of that and I see what that brings. And so that's how you fall back in love with your home, isn't it?

Yeah.

Just to, it's not as easy as kind of don't love it. One day later do love it. There's a whole load of work that needs to come in the middle of that, but it's possible and, and so, but it's, I think, you know, decluttering is all about self-awareness and it's recognising that actually as Ingrid says, you own your clutter.

You are the one that's got the decisions. You are the one that's got it in your power to make those changes. It's not a, you don't need money to do that. You just need determination. You need effort, of course, you need to learn and you need mindset. You need to take yourself out of your comfort zone, all of the things that we talk about, but it can happen, can't it?

Yeah. Well, let's have a break, Lesley, and let's talk a little bit more after the break, how you're going to fall in love with your home again.



[00:17:53] Lesley: Hi everyone. Welcome back after your break, we are talking about have you fallen out of love with your home, and we talked about that clutter doesn't help before the break. So let's talk about Lesley, how we can fall back in love with our home again.

It's just very simple. You just declutter your house from top to bottom. Job done? No, I think. So, yeah, if this is, if you are at that stage where you are completely kind of, Disillusioned with the way that your house is, that you don't want to go into it particularly or don't enjoy being there. It's important to have a plan to execute change.

And so, and we talk about this quite a lot, you know, we talk about breaking things down, but what we need to do is we need to be able to fall in love with, in my, in my opinion, and I, I know that, well, I know that Ingrid will concur cause it's our, the way that we do things. Is to do it one space at a time.

Yeah. So don't flit around. What we need to have is we need to have that transformational peace, let's call it one room at a time. Because if you can go one room at a time and we, we use our cycle of success. And if you want to know what that is, we've got podcasts on that where we take you on, um, a cycle of how to do these things. And you go round and round and round until you get to a point where the job is finished so you can enjoy it. This is very much about the enjoy stage of our cycle of success, isn't it Ingrid? Cause we need to see. The transformation we need to do that kind. Oh wow. I love this again, and I'm so excited. And we see those things all the time in our forum, in our Facebook groups, we see how excited people are by transformation.

Even if you've got a whole house to do, you know, this is what we do with our members. We have what's, uh, what we call a reset your home roadmap. So we take people on a journey of transformation from one room at a time. All the way through their home. And the purpose of that is to start with easy stuff first and then to build your decluttering muscle until you get to the end of.

But what that means as you're going along that roadmap journey is that with every room you can see what's happened. You can see the transformation that's taken place and it gives you that boost to carry on. But you also know what's coming. Yeah. So, so you can go, I've done my kitchen and now I know what's coming because my next room is the bathroom, or whatever it is.

And so you can see a pathway towards complete home transformation. Whereas if you don't take it one room at a time, It can still seem very overwhelming and you need to know what's coming next. So you need to know what you're doing now. Very, very important to um, you know, we try, what we try and do is try and take the thinking out of it, don't we?

We go, don't worry about thinking about, oh, where do I even start? Cause it's, we know that it's overwhelming. We're going to go just do this. Follow the roadmap. And don't worry because we've got a whole pathway in front of you and we've thought about everything. So don't worry about what's coming, worry about now.

Get that done and then you can enjoy and you know that you've got a defined pathway in front of you that's going to mean that you're going to get that whole house transformation in the end. So I think that's really important to take it one room at a time, isn't it, Ingrid?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's in interesting because I picked up something, um, in our forum, which is like our own internal message board. The other day when one of our members said, I'm doing this room now and now I understand why I followed the roadmap and I've done it one room at a time because I feel far more prepared now to do the room that I'm actually in because I've done so much learning and building up of my decluttering muscle in the previous rooms.

And I, if I would've started here, because our minds go to the worst room in our house, right? That's the worst room. That's where I need to go. We tried and try and do that room, but we can't because we don't have the skills yet to, to tackle that room. We haven't made enough space elsewhere in the home to hold the items that are in that room, et cetera, et cetera.

And she said, I'm now completely understanding where the, all the learning I've done in the kitchen, in the bathroom. And she's followed the roadmap. And she's like, I'm feeling far more prepared. And wow, this room is not as bad as I actually thought it was, because I, she's, she's changing her mindset as she's working her way through the roadmap.

And I think that's when, um, people who have a lot of clutter, they can feel so overwhelmed by their house. You kind of want to put out fires everywhere. You jump from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, but there's just no structure to it. And they, exactly what you're saying, Les, you can't see that, I've actually done this. This is great. And build on that success and have that, um, belief in yourself that you can do it as well.

Yeah, definitely. So I think, I think that's so important to have a structure, to go one room at a time to make sure that you enjoy each step on your journey. That's very difficult to do if you're flitting around, right? So you need. To go, I did that. That's amazing. Now I want to move on. I think the other thing that's very important and, and if we talk about the fact that we've fallen out of love with our home, often leads people to take drastic action, which is to put their house on the market and then they're going down that pathway of trying to, trying to create a home that's going to g look great for estate agents or real estate agents pictures.

That's the goal in principle isn't it? The same principle applies, and so what we want you to do is we want you to plot your progress. Another thing that we do within the membership as well is we, we really encourage people to think about the emotional, um, where they are emotionally with that room that they're working on.

What do they feel? How does it make you, um, you know, what kinda emotions are you feeling when you look at it? Mostly negative at that stage. This is how I feel. Then we think about the goal. We take the before pictures. So you can then recognise how far you have come and then you take after pictures at the end, which is almost like the estate agent's pictures.

So what we're trying to do is almost prepare something for sale, but for ourselves. Yeah. And so it's really important cause it's important to do the same thing for yourself as you would do for other people. So we, we put all this effort in to create something that's lovely for other people. But we don't do it for ourselves.

If we think about it. It's nonsensical, isn't it really? So I think it's very important for you to be able to not only feel that transformation, but see it, because I think that we forget how far we have come, don't we? You, if you go on this gradual journey, you don't always see, you know, it's like when you go on a weight loss journey.

You see these people in a, and it's so gradual, and you can barely see it week on, week on week. But all of a sudden, if you look back and you've lost a stone, You, you go, wow. I can see on that picture that I look very different the way that I look in the mirror today. And it's the same principle, isn't it?

The, the changes that you make when decluttering quite often are quite gradual, particularly if you're overwhelmed with stuff and we need to be able to. Yes, we can feel that transformation as we're going through it, but we, we need to be able to see the before and after picture. That's why before and afters are so powerful, and that's why, you know, in our Facebook group, that's what everybody loves to see.

Everybody loves to see a transformation and you need to do that for yourself. So important isn't it, Ingrid?

Yeah, definitely. So, of course, decluttering is, is key. Is key in in our whole uh, program, in our membership. Because the nice thing is once you get less clutter, you can then start to think about organising and where am I going to put stuff and how am I going to store it and do I want to put a label on it to make it more visible for myself and for others, possibly in my home.

Where items are, those are the next steps, but you, you can't organise it when you're just moving clutter around. You have to thin out what you have and all of a sudden the things start to fall into place. All the things that are out, in view on counters, on sites, on bed tables, they're out because they can't go anywhere.

So you need to almost declutter those invisible spaces. The insides of drawers, the insides of cupboards, the inside of wardrobes first. So you make room for all the items that are out. And then you can start to go, okay, hey, let, let me look at some nice boxes and baskets, and how is this working for me? Is this item in the right place, in the right room, in the right cupboard?

Where, where does visibility come in? Accessibility. I can suddenly, wow, let me put my mugs next to my coffee machine instead of having them on the other side of the kitchen, and I have to keep walking back and forth all the time. Wow, let's put all the food together. You know, all of those things start to fall into place when there's less stuff in the invisible places in your home that you can't see behind doors, you have to clear that out first, so the stuff that's out can go somewhere.

Definitely. As well, Ingrid, organisationally, it's important to look at storage at a certain stage. You can only do that once you've decluttered and know what you have to store, but it might be that your storage is not helping you and there might need to be a tweak to that. It might not be, you know, your stuff might have changed over the years.

Um, your focus might have changed. You might have different stuff. So once you've got less clutter, you can evaluate what you've got and whether actually different type of storage would suit you better, but you need to go through that process to get to that stage of looking at your storage. And also, of course, Don't underestimate the power of looking at furniture.

Honestly, one of the biggest game changers in a room is taking furniture away. Like quite often we overwhelm our, our spaces with furniture, with storage. I mean, one of the big transformations that we saw was, um, one of our members in her hallway. And because she had decluttered and gone through everything really systematically, she started to move out these extra pieces of furniture that she'd got in her hallway.

And it went from a functional space with shoes here and things that were all needed along the way because she needed, um, spaces to put her stuff. But she was like, actually, I've changed things up and I don't need that. I can go for one closed kind of cupboard to keep everything. And I can start to take storage out and all of a sudden what ensues then is a beautiful hallway, which is the most important thing when you walk straight into your home.

because you want to have that. I love being home feeling as soon as you walk through the door. So hallways are very important. They're very important for lots of reasons. They're important because they need to be functional, accessible. You need to have things there that you can kind of, you know, drop off, pick up, you know, see there's a lot that goes on in the hallway isn't there, Ingrid? But most of all, We need to be able to give ourselves that kind of warm, fuzzy feeling when we walk inside after a busy day or wherever we've been that day. So, so yeah. So start, you know, don't underestimate the power of removing furniture. It's a classic home staging tool as well. So when you are preparing homes for sale. Yeah.

Furniture starts to come out cause all of a sudden your rooms look bigger. So really evaluate whether or not you need the furniture that you've got. It's, you know, and sometimes we've inherited stuff. It just sits in there. We've got extra chairs because it works. At some point, can we, as our families change, we don't need as much seating.

Let's open these spaces up, make them look a little bit more open and bigger. Uh, and that's going to make a big difference as well, isn't it?

Removing furniture is a game changer because we buy, overtime, more furniture to house all our clutter. So instead of actually tackling the clutter, we buy more furniture to put more stuff away. But once you turn that thinking around and go, hold on a minute, I need to actually remove some of this clutter.

And then when you, and we seen it with our members as well. One of our members actually removed a big piece of, uh, a chair, I think from her living room. And she's like, the whole room has opened up. It, it looks completely different. I had too many seating for the room that I was in, and it always felt just too much.

And when, when we see our members or our clients take furniture out. We're like, okay, we're on the home stretch here. Because they're really starting to think about what works for this house. And yeah, I love it. It's fantastic. Really, really good.

And I think one of the things that, that also takes place when you go on any kind of transformational journey. So we've talked about how to do it, you know, going one room at a time. We've talked about putting organisational systems in place to help yourself with your resets and your tidying. We've talked about furniture and really evaluating storage and furniture that you've got to try and open up spaces.

But what we see quite a lot is that once this transformation has taken place and you fall back in love with your home. You start to want to do more stuff. So decluttering is free. Yeah. Isn't it? It's free. Um, I'm trying to think about whether there's any hidden cost. There aren't.

Well, the money, I mean, people might say, but the clutter costs a lot of money. Yeah. But that money is gone. You know, you can't get that money back. I mean, you might be able to sell a few bits and bobs, but you never get the value back. So it's just hours of investment of time you need to put in. But it is free.

Yes, it's free from a financial perspective. But what you then, what we then see all the time is that people want to go to that next level. Now, that might be a personal transformation. Quite often when the clarity is there in their home, when they feel that they've got a sanctuary that they, that they can, um, love to be in, they want to go on a personal journey.

And I'm doing this, I'm doing a new hobby. I am a lot, often it's a weight loss journey, you know, like I've done my house, but I've, I've felt so overwhelmed with everything that's in my house. I put myself last, but now my home is tickety boo. And so now I can start to put myself higher up that list of importance.

So people go on a personal transformation journey or they take their homes to the next level and start to look at, actually, it would be nice if I could paint this room cause this opens things up because while your room is completely cluttered, It was so hard work to think about getting decorators in and moving all the stuff and how do we even do that, you know?

And so people start to think, you know what, yes, I am going to invest some money in this lovely home that I've got and take it to that next stage. can't, I can't say enough about this. Now that we're talking about it, Ingrid, I'm quite excited the transformation.

I know it's true, but you suddenly also see then, you know, People are having their gutters done because they don't, they're like, why are these lost leaves in my gutters? And actually, it can cause leaks. I'm going to have that fixed, or I'm going to get my window cleaned it to actually have my, my windows properly washed, or I'm going to jet wash my patio outside.

Or, wow, the grass is really long. I need to, you know what? All these little jobs that. Kind of get buried under the clutter because there's always so much to do indoors as well. Suddenly kind of come, oh, actually, you know, I am going to spend a little bit of extra time cleaning and I am going, I'm getting more ahead with my, my seasonal jobs and with getting my clothes ready. I'm not forever scrabbling around. I'm actually thinking ahead, right? Okay. The cooler weather or the warmer weather is coming, let me think about, do I need to have any coats to the dry cleaners or whatever it is. You know what I mean? You can because if there's less clutter, you have more space to think about what's coming instead of doing everything in the moment all the time because you're scrambling around so your whole house starts to come together, right? It starts to all fall into place all of a sudden, and the cleaning doesn't take so long, and you start to see jobs that you've been putting off, and you're going to go, actually, I do now do have time to spend the morning fixing something, repairing something, doing a job that I've been putting off for age because I don't have all this panic the whole time.

You know what Ingrid, we've talked a lot about overwhelmed homes. But there's also another thing. You might not have fallen out of love with your home, but you might just feel a little bit like, eh, you know what I mean? A little bit of a stagnant, a bit of a stagnant kind of feeling around it. And I know that decluttering, organising, tidying, moving hangers around, making things look nice. That also brings new energy into a space, doesn't it? You know, I'm, I'm, I'm ready. It's kind of, you know, it's spring, I'm ready to do some decluttering and I know that I'll feel the space will just feel fresher. So we've talked a lot about very overwhelmed spaces, but I also want to kind of talk, you know, or wanted to mention actually just places that are just a little bit like it's time for it to have a little bit of a refresh for me to only have things in my wardrobe in particular then that I'm actually going to use and just ditch the detritus as they say. And so I think there's a bit of that, like a movement of energy through things as well that makes you feel excited by things.

So it might not be your whole house, you know, I'm very much in love with my home, but I know there are spaces where I just look and go. I could make that feel better and, you know, I could make that look better and that would make me feel so much better about it. So that's the stage that we're at. So it's not all about com completely being overwhelmed.

It's about, you know, bringing some new energy into things as well. It's so important. So I've enjoyed talking about falling in love. 

I'm feeling now, Lesley, that my garage is on the hit list. I think I need to do a bit of, of sprucing up and giving my garage a bit of love. It looked really nice at one time, but I think because we've done a lot of, um, just home improvements here, especially last year. And then of course the colder weather came and it's just been a bit dire, hasn't it, for ages.

So I feel now like, yeah, that's going to be the next big job. I've, I've done a lot indoors over the winter, but now I feel like yeah, that need, that space does need a little bit of love.

That's you and me sorted for the weekend. we are doing our own decluttering and organising projects. So I hope that you've enjoyed today's podcast. We certainly have because we see that transformation. That comes with declutter and that make people fall back in love with their homes again and save them tons and tons of money by not moving house quite often.

Yeah. So I want to know from everybody, have we inspired you to kinda go, yes, Ingrid and Lesley, that is me. I'm going to get started. Or. Hmm. This room that I've been thinking about for ages I'm now feeling inspired to start tackling. Let us know. Send us a comment. You can do that on declutterhub.com/239. You can leave us a comment, or like we said before, leave us a review maybe in your podcast player, because you can tell us as well what you're going to do. We'd love to hear from you, what action you're going to take, because that is what this podcast is all about. Think about stuff, but also to take action. So thanks so much for listening, and we look forward to being back next week with a brand new podcast.

[00:37:03] Voiceover: Thanks so much for listening to the Declutter Hub podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to us in your podcast player so you don't miss an episode, and we'll see you next week.
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Episode 239 – How do I fall back in love with my house

Episode 363 – Before you blame the clutter are you doing these 10 things?

Episode 362 – The Roots of Clutter: How Britain became a nation of stuff with Professor Jane Hamlett

Episode 361 – Decluttering for yourself – why Swedish death cleaning might not be for you

Episode 360 – Gretchen Rubin – The secret to happiness in a cluttered world

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