Decluttering Tips for Seniors Downsizing
These 15 decluttering tips for seniors downsizing starts the process of aging in place safely or preparing to move into a senior living community.
Create a Plan for Your Home
Setting a goal for your decluttering and downsizing plans for your home is important. Are you decluttering to make your home more comfortable? Is the purpose of downsizing to make the home safer to live in and navigate between rooms in the house? Do you need to downsize immediately and move to a new location or focused on decluttering to assist long-term aging in place at the current residence? Seniors downsizing and moving to a new location need a different plan than those planning on staying in their current home.
Creating a downsizing plan will help you stay focused through the process.
Stay Positive About the Process
Downsizing is often a stressful time for seniors. Following these decluttering tips for seniors will help keep the process moving forward.
Going through a lifetime of possessions and deciding what stays and what goes is overwhelming for many elderly. If you are feeling stretched too thin understand that you are not alone. Focus on the most important aspects of decluttering. Removing potential hazards, making the home liveable.
Celebrate the wins as they come. Cleaning a drawer in a dresser is a win. Getting a bedroom closet completely organized is a victory.
Know Your Timeline and Schedule
Understand the timeline and schedule for your downsizing and decluttering plans. When converting a house to a safe and secure home for aging in place you likely will have more time to allocate to the project. Seniors that are downsizing due to a future move to a senior living residence or moving into a family member’s home often are faced with tighter deadlines. Prioritize and set realistic goals. Identify early in the process if you will need help and make the phone calls necessary to arrange help from friend and family or from a 3rd party organizing specialist or moving company.
Keep the Most Special and Sentimental Items Find a Home for the Rest
Dealing with special and sentimental items is the most difficult for most seniors that are downsizing and decluttering. Consider how important the memories are associated with the items. Is there practical value in the item such as it being functional and usable or is it purely decorative? Ask your family and loved ones about special items to see if they have a place to hold it and continue to cherish the item. Giving away sentimental items is difficult, and so is retaining every single item in a large collection of precious items.
Find Places to Donate
Donating items that are in good working condition is a great way to declutter a home. As an example, when downsizing a kitchen, you likely don’t need 3 crock pots or two dozen sets of silverware. How many coffee mugs and tea cups do you need to keep? When moving to a new residence it is likely impossible to bring all of the same furniture from a single-family home to an apartment in a senior living community.
Reach out to local organizations in your area to see if they can come and pick up the extra lazy boy or couch that is in good condition, but you no longer need.
Use Label Makers and Take Notes
An often-overlooked decluttering tip for seniors is properly documenting where everything is going.
Labeling boxes and Rubbermaid totes helps keeps everything organized. Seniors should use a label maker that is large with an easy to read display. A QWERTY keyboard allows for easy typing. There are label makers which allow for easy adjustment of the font and text size, pick larger sizes so it is possible to read when the tubes or boxes are stacked in a storage location. Take notes of what is in important boxes and where they are going. Storage units for seniors are a good option when downsizing, but also consider existing space that you may have like a garage or outside storage shed.
Check Items are Working Before Deciding to Keep
Giving items to loved ones is awesome. Donating to organizations that take used household goods feels good. However, it is important to give items only if they are in good working condition.
Test any electrical items before giving or donating by checking that they turn on. If something is missing key parts or damaged but still retains some value be honest about this when offering it to a loved one. Saved instructions for an item or a special tool for disassembly and assembly should go along with items when available.
If an item is not in good working order it is ok to place it in your trash pile. Part of the downsizing process is realizing when certain items have reached their lifespan and it is not worth passing along.
Downsize and Declutter While Still in Good Health
The best time for an elderly couple to begin downsizing and removing the clutter from their house is now. You do not want to wait to start going through belongings too late. Individuals that wait until their health has really deteriorated feel rushed and more stressed by the process. The haunting feeling that something important was not saved can crush an elderly person well being when they move to a senior living facility in a rush due to a health crisis. Manage your belongings and possessions and make plans for them after you retire and begin to have time to devote to the next chapter in your life.
Set Realistic Expectations When Reselling Used Items
Selling items is a challenge. Too often we overvalue the items that are important to us. It is best to use a trusted family member or multiple third-party individual or company when needed to sell items. You want to get the most money for your future needs from selling things, but you also don’t want the selling process to linger and take forever consuming your life with decisions and concerns for items that are not used by you regularly.
Get Appraisals for Higher Value Items
If you have collections of valuables it is critical that you get assistance from a trusted source. Having family members help with getting an appraisal for high-value items is important. Many professional organizers that work with seniors have the ability to meet and discuss your items with trained appraisers and people that will know how to properly sell higher-value items.
Ask Family Members for Assistance
Family members should be part of your decluttering process. Many people retain belongings of adult children in their storage spaces. When downsizing it is a good idea to have these items removed and no longer mingled in storage.
Hire Help as Needed for Organizing and Moving
Lots of professional service providers like professional organizers for seniors and moving companies are dedicated to assisting the elderly with decluttering a home. A professional organizer in a single walkthrough of a home will put together a concrete plan to follow. Decluttering with a plan to follow is always better than trying to wing it.
Understand Storage Solutions for Onsite and Offsite
Seniors often use storage services. Be aware that storage will have a monthly charge. Decide between an offsite storage solution and what kind of storage unit will be best. Alternatively, a storage shed or a decluttered garage serves well for storing items that are not ready to be parted with yet.
Review Decluttering Tips for Seniors as you Age and Continue to Downsize
The decluttering game should never end. It is very easy to spend a ton of time creating a plan and executing only to allow the house to slip back into an unsafe space with belongings in random locations. Seniors need to keep clear paths to navigate the home. Decluttering helps prevent falls in the home and other accidents that can cause serious injury, hospitalization, or worse.
Stick to Your Plan, Schedule, and Decisions
Remind yourself while downsizing to stick to the plan and these decluttering tips for seniors. Stay on your schedule and keep your decisions made as you go.
When creating a keep, donate, trash pile it is very easy to go back to that donate pile and put something in the keep pile or worse keep something from the trash pile. When a decision is made on an item move on it and do not look back.
Inconclusion
The decluttering and downsizing process is very time-consuming. However, it is so essential for seniors to actively be involved in the process so they have good feelings about what has happened with their lifetime of possessions and most important mementos. Don’t wait to start, it might be too late.