When you’re moving house it can sometimes seem a stressful and overwhelming experience, particularly if you have been living in your old home for years. And now you are uprooting to unfamiliar ‘pastures new’. However, moving house shouldn’t be viewed in a negative light; making this transition gives you an excellent opportunity to start afresh, and do a bit of ‘life laundry’ while you’re at it.

What is Life Laundry?

Essentially, doing your life laundry involves reappraising your life and your possessions and deciding what you want to take with you and what you want to get rid of. Too many of us collect and hoard belongings until we find that we own all kinds of bits and bobs that we don’t really want and never use.
This becomes all too apparent when it’s time to move house and we suddenly find ourselves confronted by boxes and boxes of junk that now has to be hauled out of the loft or the garage and painstakingly sorted through.

How to Sort It

When confronted by our numerous and often redundant belongings, many of which are probably covered in a patina of dust and neglect, it can be tempting to feel demoralised and to want to procrastinate. But never fear. There is one very simple way to do your life laundry. It involves the labels ‘Keep’, ‘Donate’ and ‘Throw out’.

The Keep pile will be the easiest, as it is anything important, anything functional you will probably need in the near future and anything with real sentimental value. Any functional things you don’t want can go in the Donate pile; this includes old clothing, shoes, books, music and movies. The Bin pile is, basically, anything you can’t use and will never want again.