How Your Seasonal Decor Can Actually Lead To A Cleaner, Clutter-Free Home

If you love switching out your decorations with the seasons, you know that this practice can have some amazing benefits. It can foster excitement about upcoming holidays, help you creatively use your decorating skills, and make your home more comfortable and beautiful. However, there's another benefit to seasonal decorating that you might not have considered: It may also help you have a cleaner and less cluttered space.

This may sound counter-intuitive at first: after all, wouldn't having more seasonal decor automatically lead to more clutter and a messier space? However, frequently replacing your decorations actually provides you with perfect opportunities to both deep clean your home and declutter your decor items. As you take down all of your decor and replace it with new items, your home will be quite bare for you to go in and clean every surface. Because you'll be replacing items often, you'll also be forced to take inventory of what you have at least once a year and should get rid of the things you no longer want to keep.

At the same time, remember there are a few things you must do for this to actually be the case. To start, you must fully replace your decorations with each season instead of just adding more decor items to your already-decorated space. Secondly, you must declutter your items often. Finally, you should use this organization method to revolutionize decluttering your home, which will limit the amount of decor you have.

Replacing your decorations with every season will give you the perfect opportunity to thoroughly clean your space without clutter getting in the way. For instance, as you change over your house from summer to fall, you may take decor items off shelves and mantels, remove garlands and wreaths, and throw away items that have withered, like flower bouquets. Once all these items are removed, your space should be fairly empty for you to go in and wipe down counters, dust shelves, wash the windows, and vacuum the floor. In comparison, if the same decor is used all year, you never have to take down the items, filling your home and making it more difficult to clean. A clean space will also make it easier to decorate. When redecorating, you may want to follow this checklist for deep cleaning every room in your home.

Decorating with seasonal items has the added bonus of drawing attention to things that need to be cleaned. For example, while you take down a summery watermelon sculpture and get ready to replace it with a pumpkin for fall on your fireplace mantel, you may notice that you need to dust that area of your home. This forces you to look closely at your space and clean it. Conversely, if you used the same decor year-round, you probably wouldn't look as closely at your space, thereby leading you to forget to clean certain areas.

Redecorating more often forces you to look through your items regularly and declutter after the holidays. Alternatively, if you keep the same decorations hung up all the time, you might become blind to the visual clutter in your space. When you never take down your decor and store it away, some people get in the habit of just adding on decorations instead of replacing items. However, since seasonal items are replaced multiple times a year, they can help reduce the aesthetic pollution in your space.

However, for this to be true, you must be diligent about decluttering every time you replace your decorations. When you're getting ready to decorate for a new season, pull everything out of your storage containers. Discard anything that's damaged, and use what you enjoy most to decorate. If something doesn't match your theme, bring you joy, or have a place in your home, it can be donated. Further, when buying a new seasonal decoration, you should always see if you can replace it with an item you already have, and try to only purchase items that will last for a long time in terms of style and quality. If they're trendy or cheap, you may want to pass on them. Finally, before purchasing something, always consider where it can be displayed in your home.