Home insurance - tips & advice - home maintenance

Want to spring clean your house but don’t know where to start? Then follow our handy guide to getting your home organised the way you really want it.

1. Try to set aside a specific time to do your de-cluttering; if you just try to fit it in, it won’t happen.

2. If you haven’t done a major clean-up for some time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the state your home is in – you wander from room to room wondering what to tackle first and never get going. Be decisive. Pick a room and get stuck in, focus all your attention on it and try to avoid simply moving things out and into another room. Don’t think about any other room until you’ve finished the first one.

3. Sort into piles: keep, throw out and recycle/give to charity will probably cover most things. Anything that is broken should be set aside to be fixed or thrown away if it’s beyond repair. If it’s something you really love, then replace it, but don’t keep anything that is missing one or more parts, or that cannot be mended.

4. If in doubt, ask yourself when was the last time you used this vase/read this book/saw your children play with this toy etc. Be honest. If you can’t remember, it can safely be thrown away, recycled or passed on.

5. It’s fine to enjoy your de-cluttering: if that means taking a bit of time out to flick through an old photo album or put on a long-forgotten CD, that’s OK, but don’t get sidetracked from the task at hand.

6. Any items that you really can’t decide about – perhaps they belong to another member of the household – you can have a ‘decide at a later date’ pile. But don’t take the easy option and just chuck everything onto this pile!

7. In the kitchen you will find any number of plates, bowls and mugs which you never use; similarly herbs and spices that were bought for a particular recipe when you were giving a dinner party and probably various items which are well past their sell-by dates. Get rid of them.

8. The basic rule of thumb with clothes is that if you haven’t worn something for a year, you aren’t likely to. That may be a bit too strict for some people, but if you take an item of clothing out of a wardrobe and can’t imagine yourself wearing it, chances are you never will.

9. Make your clutter work for you. Take better quality items to a car boot sale, thrift store or put it on an online auction site such as eBay and get paid for it. You can also make your clutter work for someone else by donating it to a charity shop, taking it to the recycling centre or advertising it through the Freecycle Network at www.freecycle.org.

10. Keeping your home de-cluttered is all about storage, so make full use of filing cabinets, bookshelves, under-bed storage, cupboards and wardrobes. Put the things you use most in easily accessible places but don’t leave anything just ‘lying about’. Your papers and documents will also be much more user-friendly if they’re filed.

If you’ve put our top tips into practice, congratulations. Your home should seem to have a lot more space and you’ll be able to find the things you really like to use or wear.

It’s also a good time to check whether your home insurance is up to date and providing adequate coverage for your house and its contents. Find out how much cover you need with the help of our contents calculator online. You can also get an instant quote and receive an extra 20% off if you arrange it online.