At one point in your life, you must declutter your home to allow space for new things and give your living space the airy feeling it deserves. However, decluttering might not be for everyone, especially for those who like to keep as many things inside their home as possible as they hold some sentimental value. While you want to treasure them forever, sentimental clutter might not be providing your home with the relaxation and comfort you need.

A cluttered home can make a room look smaller, darker, and compressed. As you get rid of the things you no longer need, you can finally make the room spacious and bright, lifting everyone’s mood up. Yet if it’s just too difficult for you to throw out your stuff as they’re too important for you, there are still some ways how you can deal with them without breaking your heart. With that, below are some ways to deal with your sentimental clutter:

Rent A Storage Space

If you have enough budget, you might want to consider renting a household storage that allows you to keep anything you want for as long as possible. This way, you can keep the clutter away from your home and still be able to keep it, but from a few miles away.

Moreover, you can store other things indoors, as long as your storage space can accommodate them.

Ideally, you should look for a reputable storage rental like Safestore or other nearby establishments so you can guarantee that your prized possessions will be in safe hands. In addition, it’ll be helpful if you can find one nearer to your home so you can quickly drive in to check and deposit some items.

Pass On Family Heirlooms

If most of your clutters are family heirlooms, it might be heartbreaking to throw them away, especially if they’ve been with your family for generations. But if it’s something you no longer welcome inside your home as it’s taking up too much space and is just collecting dust, you might want to look for ways to get rid of it.

For starters, you might want to consider passing them on to your next generation. If you don’t have children yet, you might want to consider giving them to your sibling or cousins whom you’re confident that they’d guard them with all their hearts. It’ll be a great way to get rid of unwanted things while still keeping the item within the family.

Create A Scrapbook

A creative way you can deal with your sentimental clutter is by creating a scrapbook for them. For your non-paper items, you should take photographs and free your heart to dispose of them from your home. As you create a scrapbook, you can paste your photos and other important and flat things, such as your tickets, wrappers, or anything that you can easily paste on your scrapbook.

As you create a scrapbook, you can minimize your clutter by at least 90%, as everything will turn flat inside a piece of a book. You can also try to be creative by adding a theme and describing that item and what special memories it holds.

Repurpose Them

A great way to keep your sentimental clutter without having to keep it in its original form is by repurposing or recycling at-home clutter into something better and useable for your home. This way, you can turn your clutter into something you could use rather than something you just keep inside your room.

For example, if you’re always keeping a piece of pullover as it holds sentimental value for you, you can turn it into your pillowcase. You can even use some items as containers for your home or as a decorative touch that’ll help lessen your clutter but give them purpose inside your home.

Select One Item For Each Category To Keep

While this is more of a brutal approach, you should consider selecting only one item for each category for keeping to help you minimize your clutter at home. This way, you can allow a single item to revive your memory rather than keeping plenty of them per box. While picking just one from among amazing things might be brutal, it’s necessary to keep your home clutter-free.

Case in point, you can take out your high school memory box and just pick one item you’d like to cherish forever and put the rest in a donation box. This can help to keep your 20 boxes in a single box and allow your room to have that much-needed space.

Takeaway

Decluttering sentimental things can really be difficult, especially since they hold important pieces of you. But if you can no longer accommodate them inside your home, you should start to look at various options to let you treasure them without actually keeping them inside your home. You could try renting a storage space, creating a scrapbook, passing it on to other family members, repurposing them, or selecting only one item per category.

Overall, while decluttering might feel terrible, it should help to give you more space and welcome more memories into your life.