Finding time to declutter after retirement isn’t exactly easy. After so many years settled into the same place, stuff has a habit of piling up. As you get older, you don’t move from place to place so frequently, like you might have in your twenties – so you have less of an excuse to declutter.
By the time you get to retirement? You suddenly have a whole life’s worth of stuff, from coin collections to decade-old computers, to whatever else tickles your fancy, and you’ve got nowhere to put it all. It can hard to know where to start. You deserve to enjoy your retirement years, without being weighed down by all that stuff.
Want to make some space in your life for your well-deserved retirement? Without any fear of getting stuck amongst your garage clutter, or falling under a landslide of your spare room stuff? Read on.
Downsize Your Life (At Least a Little)
A lot of the time, retiring comes hand in hand with downsizing; there’s a good chance you’re moving to a smaller place, which might not be able to squeeze in all your stuff.
Your first step to start downsizing doesn’t require pulling the shrink-ray out just yet (I mean, if you have a shrink-ray, go for it). Start by getting practical instead.
Sort out the practical stuff you need to keep – i.e. the day-to-day life stuff you reach for on the regular – and suddenly, you’ve got one declutter-after-retirement step sorted, making the rest of the process feel a lot less daunting.
An easy way to figure out what you’re going to have space for, after you downsize: compare your, new bigger place to your current, smaller space. If you live in a three-bedroom place now but you’re moving into a two-bedroom place, it’s a no-brainer: you don’t need to keep all the furniture for all three bedrooms. Keep your favourite pieces from two, declutter the bed linen you’re less keen on, and suddenly you have a lot less stuff to sort out.
Pull Out the Measuring Tape
If you’re having trouble visualising your new downsized digs? We have a storage calculator that can help with that. You can add in your items one at a time, to the exact measurements you need, whether it’s your antique bed base, a particularly big rug, a couch you never want to say goodbye to, you name it.
Once you have an idea of how many TAXIBOXES you’re going to need, doing the maths is easy – our TAXIBOXES fit roughly 1 1/2 rooms’ worth of items, so if the TAXIBOX count you end up with in your quote exceeds the amount of rooms in your new place, there’s a good chance you might need to get back to decluttering.
Let our storage calculator do the maths for you.
Ask for a Little Help
Don’t be ashamed to ask for a hand when you need it. There’s a good chance a lot of the stuff you’re sorting out isn’t even yours – here’s looking at you, kid(s) that left all their childhood memorabilia, hiding on the top shelf of Every. Wardrobe. In. Your. House.
Ask your friends and family to come lend a hand while you declutter after retirement, and while they’re at it, they can sort out the stuff they’ve been keeping at your place for years too. Before you know it, a bunch of stuff you weren’t sure about it will be sorted… and you won’t have even had to do the heavy lifting. How good’s that?
Seriously, though – if you do need a hand with the heavy lifting, you can always add removalists to your TAXIBOX booking (we might not be able to help you decide what to keep and what to toss, but we can help you move stuff into storage, if you need us to)!
What’s the Rush?
Newsflash. There really is no need to rush – you’ve got your whole life ahead of you to sort out your stuff (seriously, you just retired).
There’s bound to be a lot of stuff for you to sort through when you set up to declutter after retirement. No one on earth is going to be capable of tackling all that at once. Might as well take it one space at a time.
Work your way up to the big stuff. To start out, tackle the small spaces first:
- The hallway
- The bathroom cabinets
- The kitchen pantry
- The coat closet
This way, you can make the emotional decisions about the sentimental stuff later on, once you have a clearer head(space). Anything you’re umming and ahhing about? You should store for now, and come back to later. You don’t want to wake up in 20 years time wishing you’d kept that one novelty mug you were unsure about. Trust us. We’ve been there.
Store it until you’re ready to come back to it.
Trust Your Gut: Store Sentimental Stuff
You’re getting ready to kick your feet up and settle into your downsized, retiree life. Your new place is a little on the smaller side, sure – but that doesn’t mean you have to toss everything out to make space in your new place.
Trust your gut. If you’re feeling sentimental about something that you’re not sure you have space for – store it. Future you will thank you when you have special stuff to tell stories about later down the track.
Avoid the Hassle and the Headaches
Just because you’re hanging onto something doesn’t mean it has to clutter up your new, downsized space – with TAXIBOX, you can store your stuff out of sight, out of mind, without all the hassle. We deliver your storage to you, you pack at your own pace, and we pick it up for you. Then, we return it to our facility, where we’ll store your stuff securely until you need it back.
When you have old friends coming round that you want to reminisce with? Get your TAXIBOX redelivered right to your door and pull out the sentimental stuff. No need to schlep all the way out to the facility and figure out how to get your stuff from point A to point B. We’ll sort all the hard stuff out for you – you’ve worked hard to get to your retiree-days, might as well make the most of it!
There’s no need to keep it at home gathering dust and taking up space, but there’s no need to get rid of it altogether, either. Try TAXIBOX to get the space you need back in your life, so you kick your feet up and get on with the relaxing, retiree stuff.
