What’s Causing The Clutter In Your Bedroom?
Sometimes clutter is really obvious, you can spot it a mile off. Other times, it’s a bit more difficult to pinpoint. You know something doesn’t feel right, perhaps cramped or untidy, yet you can’t quite figure out why. This is particularly annoying in your bedroom, which is supposed to be the place where you go to relax and unwind after a long day.
Clutter has been proven to increase your stress levels, so it’s important to keep it to a minimum in these essential spaces. Which leads us to ask one thing – do you know what’s causing the clutter to build up in your bedroom? Here’s the top 5 usual suspects!
1. All Screens, Great And Small
Screens such as Phones, Tablets and TV’s are a big contributor to visual clutter. Between the devices themselves and all the cables they need to operate (or charge), just one or two devices can quickly make your room feel untidy and disorganised.
Instead, we recommend setting up a charging station elsewhere in your home. Somewhere so that you can keep all tech out of the bedroom and freeing up space. If you must keep your phone or tablet in your bedroom, consider keeping them in drawer. Or go one better, a bespoke charging station built in to a drawer (like this fantastic example).
What’s more, one of the unwritten (and written) rules of getting good sleep is to ‘avoid using screens before bed’. Screen use, exposes you to blue light, which reduces the production of melatonin in your brain. This is an important issue because melatonin is the hormone that helps make you sleepy and controls your sleep/wake cycle. So if you want a good night’s sleep, it’s time to take the screens out of the bedroom.
2. For The Love of Clothes
Admit it, how many clothes do you have strewn around your bedroom right now? Not hung up in wardrobes, or folded neatly in drawers. The ones thrown over chairs because you want to re-wear them, piled in a corner or overflowing from the laundry hamper. All of our bedrooms have looked like this at one time or another!
Piles of clothes all over the place can quickly make your bedroom feel messy and cluttered. The simplest way to combat this is to do three things:
- Make sure you have a laundry basket in your bedroom, and make it really easy to put dirty clothes in.
- Find a place to put the clothes you want to re-wear, but don’t want to put back in the wardrobe. This keeps them from piling up and looking messy.
- Get in the habit of putting clean clothes away as soon as possible.
This is part reorganisation and part habit forming, but we promise it’ll make the world of difference.
3. Monsters Under The Bed
If you have a bed that meets the floor, you can skip this part. However, if you have a space ‘under the bed’, when was the last time you looked under it? Probably not for a while!
It’s all too easy for that space to become a dumping ground for the things you don’t want to deal with right away, or are keeping ‘just in case’. This can pile up quickly, and we’ve even seen some real “monsters” under the bed; clutter that’s so bad it actually stopped the owners sleeping properly!
If you’re using the space under your bed because you’re struggling for storage space elsewhere, consider investing in some smart bedroom storage solutions. Built-in wardrobes, over bed cupboards and alcove units can give you somewhere to put all of those items; stopping them from spilling out from under your bed. After all; if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
4. Books, Books And More Books
If you’re a bookworm, you probably have a lot of piles of books around your house. The ‘already read’ books, the ‘to read’ books, the ‘purely for display purposes’ books. The Japanese actually have a word for acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them; tsundoku. It’s funny how books always seem to multiply when you’re not looking too, so you can end up with a lot of literary clutter.
Whether you keep those books in piles or arranged on bookcases, it’s easy for them to look cluttered. Avoid double-stacking books on bookshelves to squeeze more in. Instead, leave some space above the row of books to let them breathe, and space on the shelves to make it easier to actually access the books.
Keep your ‘to read’ pile to a minimum, so that you don’t end up with a bedside table covered in books, or magazines for that matter. If you need to, get some built-in storage solutions to keep your books close by without adding to the “visual” clutter.
5. Knick-Knacks
We all have objects that we love to display proudly, but there is a point where these add to the visual clutter of a room. If you have taken care of all of the other points above and your bedroom still looks cluttered; then it’s time to tackle the knick-knacks.
We suggest picking three to five important pieces per room to display at anyone time, then rotate them with any others that you now keep stored away out of sight.
We’re Ready to Help
As you can see, it’s all too easy for bedrooms to end up cluttered, mainly because they’re the part of our home other people see least often. Therefore, there’s less pressure to keep them ‘presentable’.
Clutter can seriously impact your mental health and your happiness, so it’s worth tackling it once and for all, especially if you’re now working from home and spending more time in it. You could even look into the minimalist philosophy to take your de-cluttering to the next level.
If you’d like some assistance with bespoke bedroom storage and organisation, we would love to help. Just get in touch with the team to book your free consultation today.