Sort Your Life Dilly Carter has shared her best tips for giving your home a spring cleaning before the summer season.
The home organization expert, 43, who stars in the BBC One show with Stacey Solomon, joined Christine Lampard on ITV’s Lorraine to give her tips on how to declutter and clean your home.
Dilly revealed that people tend to get overwhelmed by the idea of spring cleaning, but she said doing it room by room can help manage the workload in small increments.
The mother-of-one gave her three main tips for decluttering every room in your house.
She said: “I think the bedroom is a great place to start, sleep is one of our most important products, it’s what we need most and if our bedrooms aren’t a relaxing place or maintained, it will affect everything.’
Bedroom
1. Vacuum mattress
“This is often overlooked, but it’s so important. We spent the whole winter in our beds with heavy quilts and blankets because of the accumulated dust.
“I would try to do it once a month if you can, because the dust accumulates. Think about all the skin on the mattress, it’s kind of gross.
2. Rule of three for bedding
“How many of us have that much bedding?” So I would like to say one on, one off, one spare. This is the guideline on how much you should have.
“Obviously if you have children at the bedwetting stage it would be great to have extra sets of bedding, but in reality many of us have 20 spare sets of bedding, ideally we would like to downsize this quantity.
“So go for the rule of three, it gives you a guideline and if you know you have double then it’s OK, but quadruple – then maybe too much.”
3. Put away the winter duvet
“That’s when we don’t need those 10 togs anymore.” We can go for something a little lighter, so put them away, vacuum pack them, and then you’ll have more space to put that spring quilt.
“Anything you can put away to save space will always be a good idea, because the idea of decluttering is to create space in the house so we feel lighter. ‘
Sort your life Dilly Carter, 43, shared her top tips for giving your home a spring cleaning ahead of the summer season on ITV’s Lorraine on Monday.
The home organization expert, who stars in the BBC One show with Stacey Solomon, joined Christine Lampard (right) on the ITV show to give her tips on how to declutter and clean your home.
Kitchen
1. Check the dates
“Start on the left side and work your way up, make sure you get everything out, check the dates. Every time we take something out of a closet, we want to put it together. Make sure all your boxes are together, your pasta is together, your snacks, your breakfast items so you can create areas when you put everything back together.
2. Organize the layout
“You can have all your breakfast containers on one shelf, all your snacks on another, what we want is for the kitchen to flow.”
3. Reuse containers
“The use of containers is so important that we’re constantly getting boxes through our doors, we’ve got old tin cans and Quality Street coffee pots to pack pulses, cereals and all that stuff. Try to use what you have.
Bathroom
1. Create a calm space
“We want a beautiful bathroom that we can walk into, escape into and feel like we’re relaxing, we don’t want products all over the sides of the bathroom.”
2. Rule of five
“When it comes to cleaning supplies, we have a lot of them in the bathroom, which just isn’t necessary. Think about the essential products we might need near our toilet, it’s probably just bleach.
“Typically we should only have five cleaning products. It may just be an antibacterial liquid, bleach or Fairy Liquid. It may be a specialty cleaning product. But then that’s it.
3. Keep the windowsill clear
“Many of us block our window sills with products, we can’t see out, so it’s nice to have bright, clear surfaces.”
Living room
1. Lay out everything
“We like to go there to relax don’t we, it should be the place where we switch off and unwind at the end of the night.
“But that’s usually the space where all the toys and all the laundry are, there’s all kinds of chaos in the living room. Take out anything that’s bothering you.
2. Group similar items together
“Consolidate what you can, then reduce what you can, then put it all back together. You may not have enough storage, figure out what you have in your living room and think about what could look neater so that when you relax you aren’t looking at a pile of chaos.
3. Erase three things
“A lot of times we can feel too overwhelmed thinking I have to declutter, get everything out of my house, but start with something small, three items, start with something small, small challenges.”