How to Declutter and Downsize your Home

Minimalism is a big trend these days. For a wide variety of reasons, many homeowners are deciding to declutter and downsize their homes. There are several steps to this process, and one of the most important is finding a bin rental company to take or remove the items you don’t need.

How a Bin Rental Company Can Help You Declutter and Downsize

There are several different reasons why people choose to declutter their homes. Junk builds up over the years and sometimes takes over whole rooms. But if you plan on downsizing to a new property, you can’t take it all with you.

Rapidly rising home prices mean that many homeowners have built up large amounts of equity. However, it’s not just older Canadians who are considering the merits of downsizing. Living a more straightforward, smaller life is appealing to a wide variety of homeowners.

Moving into a smaller home comes with several advantages. It can save money or make payments more manageable. Additionally, it can facilitate a shift in life, where you can spend more of your time and money on travelling, enjoying the company of trends, and have new experiences.

Best-selling authors like Marie Kondo or Margareta Magnusson (the Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning) have captured the public mood, inspiring them to take a different approach to organizing their space. With minimalism, less is more.

If you’ve lived somewhere for a decade or more, you’ll accumulate a lot of possessions. But trying to declutter an entire home is not an easy process. Knowing where to start or what to focus on can be overwhelming.

If this is the stage you find yourself at on your downsizing journey, don’t worry. This article will provide you with the steps you need to take to declutter and downsize your home, from deciding how to sort what you do or don’t need up to the liberating moment of renting a disposable bin and saying goodbye to all those unnecessary items.

Advantages of Decluttering Your Home

While this article focuses on decluttering your home before you downsize, there are several benefits of decluttering a home even if you plan to stay in it.

We all tend to accumulate more things as we live, like clothes, books, kitchenware, electronics, furniture, etc. Many of these items are stored away just in case we need them. Often, they are forgotten about entirely.

In many cases, all this clutter is kept out of sight. Consigning junk to a garage, a garden shed, drawers or the attic can stop you from realizing how many unnecessary items you have. It’s only when you come to move that you know you’ll need a huge disposal bin to dump all these goods.

Many people live with clutter that takes over their living space. This scenario can make even large living spaces seem small and cramped.

There are several benefits to a decluttered home.

Mental Health

When your home is cluttered, your mind can also become cluttered. Living in a cramped and disorganized environment can have lots of negative outcomes. It can make you feel stressed to never be able to find anything or ashamed when you have visitors.

Even your sleep can be affected because your brain processes too many stimuli. A clean home gives you more clarity.

Easier to Clean

A decluttered home is easier to clean. Instead of moving boxes, clothes, and old magazines around a room to clean underneath, you can get right to floors, surfaces, and walls.

Accessing these spaces means that you can ensure your home is free of pests, mould, and any of the other things that can build up in confined spaces.

Reduce the Risk of Injury

If your home is cluttered, you increase the risk of someone having an injury. Tripping or falling over clutter is a surprisingly common cause of accidents around the house. So, clear those hazards away, and if you don’t need them, get them into a disposal bin.

Increase Home Value

If you are planning on downsizing, you’ll need to sell your home. As we mentioned earlier, too much stuff can make a home seem far smaller than it is. So make your home as attractive as possible by removing as many unnecessary items as you can.

We’d recommend hiring a bin rental and throwing out what you don’t need before putting your home up for sale.

Benefits of Downsizing Your Home

There are lots of reasons to downsize your home. Changes in circumstance or employment can mean you need to reduce spending. When your children move out, it can leave you with too much space. You might want to move to an area to be closer to friends and family, but the property prices are very high. Or you could wish for a simpler life with less home upkeep, maintenance, and clutter.

Whatever your reasons, downsizing has several perks, like:

• lower monthly mortgage payments
• lower electricity, air-con and heating bills
• less upkeep and maintenance
• a simpler and more straightforward lifestyle

If you want to unlock the benefits of downsizing, you’ll need to get rid of some possessions to fit into a smaller home. There are several ways to approach this. But there is no getting away from the fact that you’ll need somewhere to put everything you don’t need.

You can google a “trash dumpster near me” service and hire a bin rental. Having a disposable bin on your property while you clear out and declutter your home is an excellent option because it allows you to take your time as you move from room to room.

Of course, if you don’t want to face it yourself, you can always hire a junk removal company. Many bin rental companies, like JunkIt, also offer this service. There are lots of reasons why people need help junking items, from saving time to physical limitations.

Whatever the reason, having a disposable bin on site is a crucial part of getting rid of what you no longer need.

Step-by-Step Guide to Declutter and Downsize Your Home

Now that you understand the benefits of a decluttered home, downsizing, and hiring a disposable bin, it’s time to take action.

Here is a step-by-step guide to help you declutter and downsize your home.

Step #1 – Plan

There are a lot of sayings about good planning like “By failing to plan, you are failing to prepare” or “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” These truisms all circle around the same thing — the essential part of a big job is figuring out how to do it.

Decluttering for a downsizing move isn’t something you can go into without a map. There are a lot of things to organize, like getting time off work, help, disposal bin rental and so on.

The first thing to do is establish a moving date. Moving is a stressful experience, so you’ll want to give yourself enough time to get everything done. Of course, if your home could easily be featured on the TV show Hoarders, you’ll probably want to declutter before you move so that you can extract the best-selling price.

So, once you have your date, you’ll want to work back. It’s best to give yourself 2-3 days to declutter an average-sized family home. You may need more or fewer days, depending on your situation. But we’d advise that you try and give yourself as much time as possible if you plan to sell and recycle some of the clutter.

The critical component of decluttering is removing unwanted items from your home. They’ll need to go somewhere, so google a trash dumpster rental near me to arrange a disposable bin rental. The bin price will depend on size. Typically, disposable bin rental is charged by capacity.

It’s easy to underestimate how much space you’ll need in a) your removal van and b) your disposable bin. So, how do you figure out how much space you really need?

It all starts with pen and paper.

Planning Declutter Method

Get a pen and paper and sketch the layout of your home. It doesn’t need to be too detailed or exact, but you should have some idea about the dimensions of each room.

When you finish your sketch, assign each room a difficulty value between 1 and 5.

A room marked with a difficulty of 1 signifies a low amount of clutter; a 5 means that many things need to be removed and tidied.

Once you’ve got this recorded, you should start getting some idea of the job that is at hand. Additionally, you’ll be able to estimate how many cubic yards of junk you’ll need when it comes to bin disposal rental.

How you approach the process from here depends on your temperament. If you are the type to lose motivation easily, it might be best to start with the less cluttered areas and ease yourself in. As you progress and check off rooms, you might find yourself energized and growing into the task.

For others, tackling the job by starting with the more challenging areas will work. The beauty of this approach is that the tasks get easier with each room.

Disposable Bin Rental

You’ve got your moving date; you know how you will approach the job and roughly how long it will take. You even have an idea about how many cubic feet of junk you’re going to get rid of. It’s time to book a disposable bin rental.

The size and price of the disposable bin rental will depend on how much stuff you want to get rid of. It’s worth remembering that services like JunkIt try to recycle as many of your items as possible. This can save you a trip to the charity shop because you’ll know that anything that is reusable can find a new home.

The rental bin price is dependent on cubic yards.

5 Cubic Yard bin price = $258

10 Cubic Yard bin price = $358

15 Cubic Yard bin price = $458

20 Cubic Yard bin price = $558

Remember that the bin price above is the whole amount that you’ll pay. JunkIt uses a transparent pricing model. There are no hidden charges like disposal fees or fuel surcharges. The price you are quoted is the price you’ll pay for the service.

Step #2 – Decision Time

The next step is the decluttering stage. Maybe your disposable rental bin is outside, ready to be filled up. Or perhaps you’ve still got time. But this part is where you’ve got to get ruthless as you prepare to shrink your possessions.

There are a couple of things to consider here. First, what sort of downsizing are you doing? If you’re moving from a multi-level family home with a garage to a condo, you’ll need to make some significant cuts. On the other hand, if you are just going down a bedroom, you’re not losing too much space. Consider the storage options in your new home too.

There are a few ways you can approach the decision to get rid of unwanted things and put them in the disposal bin. For each different item, ask yourself a few questions like:

• Do I need this?
• Do I use this?
• Where will it go in the new home?
• Does it bring me joy? (thanks, Maria Kondo)

Think about your new home and try to visualize where each item will go. If you’re considering putting things in long-term storage, you need to ask yourself if you really need them or would it be better to donate or sell the item.

Now that you know the essential items you want to bring, you’ll have another decision to make.

Everything can go into one of these categories.

1) Items that are coming to your new home

2) Items that could be valuable to someone that can be sold or given away

3) Items that will go in the disposable bin

It’s worth remembering that an environmentally responsible dumpster rental service like JunkIt goes through the items and recycles up to 60%. So if you don’t want to get into posting Craigslist ads or making trips down to the charity shop, you can load everything you don’t need into the disposable bin, and it will be re-used if possible.

If you’ve lived in a home for a long time, sorting through many year’s worth of stuff will be a long process. Additionally, it will be full of memories, both good and bad. So make sure you give yourself enough time.

Pro-Tip: Many homes have giant filing cabinets for tax documents, paperwork. letters, and real estate files. Some of this will be relevant and worth keeping, but much of it won’t. The best policy here is to digitize what you need and throw the rest out. Of course, make sure to shred anything with sensitive financial details on it.

What Can Go and What You Can’t Live Without

There is no absolute right or wrong here. Much of what you keep and what goes into the disposable bin depends on how extreme your downsizing is.

Here is a guide to help decide between “I’m keeping it” or “it’s going with the disposable bin rental people.”

Clothes, Shoes, and Other Accessories

One of the best ways to cut back on stuff is to do an honest evaluation of your closest. However, it’s not always easy. We all hold on to clothes that remind us of the past and other people. Similarly, as we get older, most of us have a few items that we used to fit into and aspire to once more.

Downsizing to a new home is like a new beginning. And you can’t bring old baggage (or clothes with you). So go through every item and get rid of whatever you wouldn’t wear right now, weather or occasion permitting. Anything that is out of style or doesn’t fit belongs in the charity shop or your disposable bin.

Furniture & Home Decor

Getting rid of furniture can be tough. Often, it was costly to buy, and it has years of use left in it. Couches, tables, chairs, coffee tables, and so on all take up their share of space. And replacing them won’t be cheap.

But if you’re downsizing, not all of it can come with you. Think about your new home and try to understand where each item will go. If you have artwork on the walls of your home, contemplate whether it will fit in the new one. Having a smaller life means making hard decisions.

Consider what you can sell or give away. The rest needs to go in your disposable bin for recycling.

Pro-Tip: Large or bulky items of furniture can be costly to ship. If you’re moving far away, calculate the cost of a replacement vs. shipping fees. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s time to sell it or put it in the disposable bin.

Kitchenware

If you are downsizing into a smaller kitchen, decluttering your dishes, plates, glasses, and other cooking hardware is necessary. Again, storage space is probably your most crucial consideration. Larger kitchens come with lots of cabinets and drawers.

Think of your new kitchen. Does it have space for three different styles of wine glass? If the kids have moved out, do you really need all those plates? What about your kitchen gadgets? If they’re dusty or hidden away, they need to go into the disposable bin.

Home Linen

If you’ve been in a house for a while, you’ll no doubt have accumulated enough home linen for the whole neighbourhood. Go through your linen closet and ask yourself some questions. How many towels does one individual need? How many changes of bedclothes are necessary?

It’s easy to get practical about getting rid of unused blankets and bedsheets. If you’re downsizing in bedrooms, you won’t need all these pillows and blankets. Everything else can be gone with a call to a disposable bin rental company.

Equipment

Another source of clutter in a family home is equipment from various hobbies. Old tennis racquets, musical instruments, and sports equipment can sit gathering dust in an attic or garage. It’s not always easy to put this stuff in the disposable bin.

But if it won’t fit in your new home, and you are truly honest with yourself about the utility of each item in your life, you may need to leave it for the bin rental company to take.

People try out a hobby and give it up all the time. Try and get it into the hands of someone who will use it, sell it, or put it into the disposable bin. It’ll make space for the next hobby you’d like to try.

The Dreaded Junk Drawer

The junk drawer is the epitome of clutter. Random items of dubious utility or value shoved out of sight into a jumbled-up drawer. Pieces of string, broken items, buttons, unusually sized batteries, printer cartridges for machines from the 90s: yes, the junk drawer is full of things that no longer have a home or purpose.

The junk drawer is a good place to start decluttering. Sort through it mercilessly. If you don’t need it, it goes into the disposable bin.

Outdoor Equipment

Sheds and garages up and down the country are full of unused outdoor equipment. Often they are hidden or packed away, so they’re easy to ignore. But if you’re downsizing, you’ll need to do something about them.

Gardening equipment like lawnmowers and strimmers might become obsolete if you don’t have a yard. It’s a good idea to keep tools, but what about specialist equipment that you haven’t thought about in years? Yes, the disposable bin.

If it doesn’t work or you don’t use it, factor it into the cubic yards of space you’ll need when you’re enquiring about disposable bin rental.

Books and Memorabilia

Old course and school books, children’s books, and novels you’ll never read. While it may be time-consuming, it’s worth going through each volume and deciding if it can come with you to your new home. It’s worth remembering that books and DVDs can all be digitized, which can help cut down on space significantly.

Memorabilia is some of the most challenging clutter to get rid of. Old cards, concert tickets, photo albums, letters, etc., are profound reminders of our past. Many people feel strange about letting go of these items.

If that sounds like you, digitizing could be the solution. You can scan cards and letters with your phone and upload them to the cloud—likewise, old photos.

Decluttering to prepare for a move to a downsized property is full of difficult decisions. But the easiest and best decision you can make is to google a “trash dumpster rental near me” so you can find a bin disposal rental company. You can’t get rid of items without somewhere for them to go.

Step #3 – Deep Clean

As you pack items into boxes or your disposable bin, you should clean as you go. Checking off each room will make you feel happy and motivated. On moving day, ensure you get the help of friends or family.

But don’t throw your cleaning products into the disposable bin. You’ll need them for your new place. Before you unpack anything, clean the floors, walls, ceilings and other spaces. But don’t stop there. Clean inside drawers and closets too.

Step #4 – Organize Your New Space

Now that you’ve reduced all your possessions and cleaned your new home, you’re ready to unpack. Don’t go back to your old cluttered ways. You need to be organized and consider each new item you put into your house.

Before bringing anything through the front door, consider what purpose it serves. One of the best solutions for a smaller place is multi-purpose furniture. There are loads of great ideas out there, like coffee tables, chairs, and dining tables that contain storage. Or furniture that you can fold away. Sofa beds are another great idea so you can accommodate visitors now that you don’t have a spare room.

Even once you move in, you need to continue to declutter. Stay vigilant; clutter can quickly build up. Think about each room and identify areas where you can save space. A wall-mounted TV frees up floor space, likewise floating shelves.

Conclusion

Decluttering and downsizing your home takes a lot of time, effort, and planning. But if you’re moving into a smaller place, you’ll need to make some compromises. The key thing is to be as unsentimental as you can when it comes to stuff you haven’t used or thought about for years.

Getting rid of items you can’t fit and don’t need in your new home is easy with the right disposable bin rental company. Choose a supplier whose bin price is transparent and doesn’t include extra hidden costs like disposal fees.

A bin disposal rental is a huge help when you’re downsizing. Environmentally responsible services like JunkIt guarantee that anything that can be reused or recycled will be kept out of the landfill. While you might not need something in your new streamlined life, the stuff can still find a home. So don’t feel bad about throwing it out so you can make more space for yourself.

Decluttering your house? We like to think of it as decluttering your life. A cramped, messy space so often manifests as a cluttered mind. You are so overburdened by your material possessions that you simply don’t have room to think – literally and figuratively.

A good clean up every once in a while is essential for discovering space that was hidden before. Just as you do it with your home, your mind too will start to declutter. In this article we are looking at things you should dispose to make some real room for you.

Rid some fake foliage

We cannot believe this is a thing ourselves but large fake foliage is something that really needs to go. If you have those large fake planters that have been gathering dust for years, no better time than now to throw them out. Unlike real plants these won’t fill your lungs with fresh oxygen, but microplastics.

Don’t stow storage

Ironically, cardboard boxes and the like are one of the biggest culprits that take up too much space in your home. ‘What if I need it’ – you haven’t needed it in years and you’ll find a way when you do. Not only that, you’ll be less tempted to hoard old items. You won’t believe how many times we’ve been called to condos to empty out lockers which have been filled with empty boxes, suitcases and the like – only for them to have decayed over time.

Where do I sit guv’nor?

Not on that old armchair, for sure, you shouldn’t be. There is nothing wrong with keeping furniture for many years. In fact, it is very environmentally responsible. However, dusty, saggy and mouldy furniture needs to go. Dirty couches, broken nightstands, old bed slats and mattresses all need to be thrown.

Closet organizers and the things they organize

Love your closet organizers? It’s a pity they are holding items of clothing that you haven’t touched in years and most likely won’t look at again. Your closet is a prime candidate for emptying. Old clothes that don’t look old should go to charity shops. Larger closet organizers should be collected and left for junk collection Toronto. At least now you’ll be able to walk into your walk-in closet.

Can’t find the remote? Throw away that TV

It is truly amazing how much people love hoarding broken and absolutely unusable electronics. That would be okay if TVs were smaller, but when a 60 inch behemoth stops working, it’s hard to make it disappear. Large electrical items cannot be thrown away safely with your garbage. In any case, that’s a waste of the recyclable components that could otherwise be used. Call our team for junk collection Toronto and have your appliances large and small disposed of safely and responsibly.

Don’t leave a paper trail

You should get the best garbage removal Toronto knows to dispose of your old paperwork. Banks, social services, even your insurer have gone (mostly) paperless, so stop hanging on to those crinkly relics. Call us and we’ll destine your waste paper for an afterlife of recycled living.

Convenient Garbage Removal Toronto

Services for junk collection Toronto are extremely useful for decluttering your life. Just one phone call and a team of junk removal specialists will take your junk away. No need to hire a bin, no need to haul it to a drop-off depot.

Call Junk It today and schedule your garbage removal Toronto or elsewhere in the GTA. Our team will find a time convenient for you for the pickup. Not sure how much stuff you need to remove, our team offers free on-site estimates. Best of all, you only pay for the space you use and there will be no hidden charges whatsoever.

Moving house and need to throw out junk? Starting a remodel? Need to rid evidence of your failed DIY endeavours before your better half puts them on FML?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to the above (or have reasons other than those) read on. Garbage bin rental is about the easiest and most cost effective way for you to get rid of all your waste. And it’s a no-holds-barred affair; throw whatever you want.* Whether it’s yard waste, renovation material, mattresses or hipster furniture, we aren’t here to judge (empathize, probably). Keep reading and find out about the different sizes of garbage bins.

*Mostly. (Our lawyers made us asterisk that)

Mini – but mighty

Our smallest dumpster, ‘Mini’, is a great option if you are constrained for space. Mini but mighty, we like to say. It’s a lot more disposal space than your average black and blue bins. For small home renovations (or those DIY projects that your partner keeps giving you the stink eye for) and landscaping jobs this is a great option. It’s garbage bin rental that’s ideal for spring cleaning small homes/condos, for yard waste and even small renovation projects.

The lowdown

• 5 cubic yards of space
• Low loading height
• Great for dirt, soil, household rubbish, DIY projects that were just not meant to be

Small – Goldilocks size

We like to think of our ‘Small’ dumpster as the Goldilocks dumpster. Not too big, not too small. This dumpster must be just right – why else would it be one of our most popular garbage bin rental. At this size it is still very easy to manoeuvre into tight spaces (think driveways, back alleys). But it’s capacious enough to take on roofing projects, home renovations, and thorough home clean-ups.

The lowdown

• 10 cubic yards of space
• Easy to manoeuvre, loading height
• Great for shingles and roofing material, drywall, plaster, construction waste, yard waste, carpets, mattresses

Medium – Now we’re talkin’

This is a spacious dumpster which can take on the mess from large, multi-room renovations, large home remodelling projects, and entire roof replacements. Of course, you can throw away yard waste or any other household garbage. And, yes, it’s big enough to haul away the retro couch that looked so good in the antique store that you just had to pick it up.

The lowdown

• 15 cubic yards of space
• Big enough for oblique items, still easy to access
• Great for renovation and demotion waste, construction material, impressively thorough house cleanouts

Large – No job too large

This is the perfect size for large residential and commercial cleanouts. Got an Everest size clean-up on your hands? This is the garbage bin rental you should go for. If you like to hoard (and we mean really hoard) this is the dumpster for you. Large furniture, crockery, mattresses, even disused appliances – it’ll swallow them all.

The lowdown

• 20 cubic yards of space
• Easily accessible with large doors
• Great for appliances, furniture, estate cleanouts, large renovation and remodelling waste

Not sure about garbage bin rental?

Does the following sound appealing to you:

• Spending a day hauling garbage and recycling to the Drop-off Depot in your city, risking life, limb and sanity?
• Running through the convoluted process of weighing, throwing, weighing, throwing, arguing, paying, feeling cheated at the Drop-off Depot?

That was rhetorical. Of course it doesn’t. Get garbage bin rental and let us do the heavy lifting instead.

Junk It makes garbage bin rental a very simple and convenient affair. When you fill out an easy-to-understand form on our website or get in touch with our team, you can choose drop-off and pick-up dates, select exactly the container you want and get transparent pricing.

We will come and park your container where you want it and pick it up on the day of your choosing. In fact, you don’t even need to be home. Call us today at 1-866-JUNK-IT to find out more or get started here.

Failing to get rid of your junk the right way can land you in a hot mess, you know. Canada is a green and pleasant land, and we all have to help keep it that way. No one wants to see mountains of garbage, riddled with reusable and recyclable materials.

Did you know: Don’t throw that smartphone! Internal circuitry and even the shell of your phone can be recycled.

We take a look at a few simple ways to turn ‘trash into cash’*. Actually, there’s a greater and more serious point to this too. So much of what we dispose is in a condition that it can be recycled, repaired or even reused. It greatly helps reduce the damage to the environment and keeps our landfills from piling up.

Call Junk It if you need help with larger items.

*Figure of speech. Please don’t try selling your trash.

1. Yard Sale

Yard sales are a great way of cleaning up clutter and earning some cash. Furniture or décor may have lost your fancy, but it’s new for someone else. The best thing about a yard sale – you really think about what can be sold as opposed to being binned. Imagine, you are getting paid for your ‘waste’ and you don’t even need to haul it (just hawk it).

Good for: furniture, decorations, memorabilia, functional appliances

2. Aluminum cans

From Canada Dry to Budweiser, aluminum cans fill up our recycling bins in an unending sea. Not only are they going to be recycled, they’ll be generating someone a profit too. Instead, keep your cans and sell them off at a recycling centre near you. Make it a fortnightly or monthly routine, and watch the drinks pay for themselves (well, somewhat).

Good for: Aluminum cans, such as carbonated drinks, frozen foods

3. Scrap metal and cardboard

Actually, that advice can be applied to scrap metal and cardboard generally. Bicycles, leftover building materials, cardboard boxes and so much more can be sold for cash. What is ‘waste’ is the space in your garage storing all of this unused stuff. For instance, did you know metals such as copper (used in electrical wiring) are actually very valuable commodities? There are businesses thriving on such recycling trade.

Good for: Leftover building material, bicycles, cars, garden equipment, boxes, tools, electrical wiring

4. Habitat For Humanity

Let’s face it, so much of our junk is not actually irreparably damaged or ruined. As pro junk removers, we know that first-hand. Habitat for Humanity is a very laudable cause. Not only will they come to your home to pick up your furniture and appliances, you get a charitable tax receipt too. It may not feel like ‘cash in hand’ but it will make a difference come time to pay your taxes. Find out how much you could save in tax.

Good for: furniture, appliances, building material

5. Kijiji, Facebook, eBay, et al

Such great places to sell stuff you don’t need. One person’s smartphone with broken screen is another’s vaunted parts bin. There are takers for all sorts of stuff on the internet. Old electronics and gadgetry has a lot of collectible value. Help your old cassettes make a hipster feel at home again.

Good for: memorabilia, electronics, vintage gadgetry, furniture (and everything else, too?)

For all the things you can’t make money from, call Junk It to haul it away. We are junk hauling experts. Our customers agree too; how else do you get rated best of HomeStars for nine years!

Our team understands your home is your palace. We tread lightly when cleaning out your junk. Our full list of services is here. And we are trusted junk removal experts for furniture, yard waste, construction leftovers and more. Many of our customers make use of your dumpster and garbage bin rental too, in times of need.

Are Disney VHS Movies Worth Keeping?

VHS was never a particularly good format for collectibles. With an even shorter lifespan than DVDs, they are impossible to both use and keep in good condition. They are also extremely vulnerable to moisture, magnetism, and heat. Although there are some exceptions, the majority of VHS are completely worthless. It may be worth calling a junk removal company if you have other stuff you want to get rid of.

The Digital Revolution

Disney did a pretty good job preserving their original film cans. This means that no matter how well-kept your VHS is, a much better version of the film is locked in a vault somewhere. It is only a matter of time before Disney, hoping to capitalize on nostalgia, transfers all of its best films to a digital format. DVDs, Blue Rays, and downloads will always have a sharper image and sound, and longer lifespan, than poor analog VHS.

However, there is still value in some incredibly rare Disney VHS.

The One’s Worth Keeping

What to Do with the Ones not Worth Keeping

If you have all the original packaging and every tape is in its proper case, your collection might still be useful to someone. Some charities in Toronto, like the Salvation Army, will still take and use VHS tapes. Unfortunately, many other charities will just throw them out. If you want to cut out the middle man, call a junk removal service.

9 Strategies To Prevent Clutter At Home

Clutter in the house can disrupt your productivity and general well-being. However, there are some easy things you can put into practice to prevent clutter in your home.

1. Utilize the One-In-One-Out Rule.
   This rule is self-explanatory. For every item that you bring into your house, you must also get rid of one item.
2. Store Items Close to Where they are Used.
   One of the main reasons why clutter occurs is because items are not stored near to where they are used. If you keep the items close to their ‘home,’ you’re more likely to put them away after use.
3. Utilize Storage Containers.
   It is important that all possessions have a proper home. Storage containers for each room (a file cabinet in the office, for example), will ensure that items aren’t being placed around the house unnecessarily – as long as you make use of them, of course. Remember to store files vertically and avoid piling, as this will only encourage items to get lost.
4. Make Use of Wall Space.
   Walls are an often overlooked area when considering storage options. Installing shelves or bulletin boards on walls can instantly reduce clutter.
5. Invest in Multifunctional Furniture.
   Multifunctional storage, such as an ottoman which could house blankets, a coffee table with shelves or drawers, or even a bed with drawers all provide additional storage options for your home, therein reducing clutter.
6. Declutter While Watching Television.
   Organizing items while watching a television show or a movie will make the event much more enjoyable.
7. Tackle Cluttered Areas in Small Chunks.
   Do not set out to organize your entire home at once; this is only likely to overwhelm you and will make it more likely that you will put it off until “tomorrow.” Instead, set the timer for 15 minutes and set out to declutter a specific area in your home. This will make it much more manageable. The timer will also force you to make decisions about whether to toss out certain items more quickly.
8. Let Go of Useless Items.
   A lot of useless items in homes are ones that we hold on to out of sentimentality. However, these items can quickly cause clutter. Therefore, letting go as many of these sentimental objects as possible will only reduce the overall clutter in your home.
9. Toss Out/Recycle Broken or Old Items.
   Often times, people tend to hold on to broken or old items with the intent of repairing them at a later date. However, it is important to consider their actual monetary value, because it can be better to simply toss, recycle or donate the item, saving you space in the end. Appraising the value of these items might even save you energy costs if you are keeping items that are not running at their peak efficiency.

To reduce the amount of clutter in your home even further, consider contacting our team at Junk It! We will remove all of your junk in no time.

5 Hacks For A Decluttered House

Clutter is insidious. It is something that creeps up over time, a new book here, some throw pillows there, after a while it can start to feel like it’s just the way things have always been. Not so. Clutter has a way of becoming the norm, the same way that tidiness and organization can become the norm as well. What many people don’t realize is that clutter is the culmination of a hundred different small, but impactful bad habits compounding over the course of months, even years. If you are serious about decluttering your home, here are 5 great hacks to a decluttered house.

Create a newspaper spot

If you subscribe to various papers or magazines, they can quickly pile up, especially since we don’t always have time to actually sit down and read them all. A newspaper here, and a stack of magazines there, in the bathroom, the living room, and the family room can quickly add up to mountains of material all over the house. Create a box or cupboard designated solely to storing papers and magazines, it’s a great way to eliminate scattered periodicals from your home.

Create a no-clutter zone

Establish a space (it doesn’t have to be an enormous one) that will become your clutter-free zone. Whether it be in the kitchen, at the front door, in the living room, promise yourself that you are going to keep the little odds and ends of your life out of this space. After you are comfortable that this space has become sacred, slowly expand. Create another, and another, until eventually, most of your home becomes a clutter-free zone.

Find a home for miscellaneous items

If there is a seemingly endless variety of “homeless” items around your house that serve a purpose, but are always drifting from room to room, counter to counter, pick a spot for them and make sure they end up there. Pick 5 items. Find a spot where you want them to belong, and when you find them wandering, return them to their respective places.

Donate to charity

One of the main problems with getting rid of non-essential items in your home is not knowing how you are going to do it. Throwing things away seems wasteful, and moving clutter from one room to the next is counter-productive. Consider making annual or bi-annual donations to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Both of these organizations have pick-up services, depending on your area, and are always looking for new donations to pass on to people less fortunate.

Get the whole family involved

Decluttering often falls under the category of domestic work and as such, whether male or female, can unfortunately become the sole responsibility of the person charged with those tasks. Getting the whole family involved, especially kids, whose concept of clutter is usually nonexistent, will make decluttering the house so much easier. Letting your kids know that their belongings, and those of the entire house, have set places will inevitably lead to less clutter.

Decluttering doesn’t have to become a full time job. You can set aside five minutes every day, or a bigger chunk of time once a week, to tackle clutter. Organization is a set of practices you train yourself and your family to live by. It may seem like a chore when you begin, but if you follow some or all of the above 5 hacks for a decluttered home, you will notice the place starting to shape up in no time flat.