Decluttering is Dilly Carter's love language. The tidying expert from BBC One's Sort Your Life Out once helped an ex-boyfriend clear up and organise his mother's home after she died. "It was a way that I could help him," Carter says. "And in doing that, we ended up getting back together." They're married now. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Growing up in a chaotic home with two working parents, she learned early on that she preferred being tidy and organised. Carter worked as a PA for business executives and, as well as keeping their diaries in order, began making sure their homes were too. In her new BBC video podcast, Sort Your Life Out Unpacked, she interviews famous faces, including Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Lorraine Kelly, about their favourite items and advises how they can best keep their homes free of clutter.
The four most common mistakes
According to Carter, the first common mistake is storing infrequently used kitchen appliances on "prime real estate". "I like to think of kitchens as real estate," says Carter. "Everything in your kitchen has to earn its place in there." She commonly sees kitchens where infrequently used gadgets take up "prime real estate"; things which could be stored in drawers, cupboards or even the loft. "Go through your kitchen regularly and check what you need, see what you use regularly and [what] you don't." Another tip is not to buy so many kitchen appliances to begin with but, if you do, make sure it's a "multi-use product". For example, blenders are more versatile than juicers. If you want to make juice instead of a smoothie, you can extract liquid from the blended pulp of fruits and vegetables using a sieve or cheesecloth - no need for a specific gadget only does one thing.
The second mistake is rolling T-shirts. Rolling your T-shirts may be an efficient way of getting them into a drawer but you won't be able to see them all when you're picking your outfit for the day. File folding (where the pile is on its side instead of clothes being stacked on top of each other) ensures you can at least see the colour of the T-shirt even if you can't see the image or design on the front. "We only roll or fold when we're trying to maximise the space of a drawer," says Carter, though you should be careful about which clothes you choose to file fold. She recommends looking at the age and material of your shirts, blouses and T-shirts before deciding how to store them. "I would say that your shirts (and blouses) definitely need to be hung, but your T-shirts definitely can be file folded."
The third mistake is storing children's toys in one big box. For families with young children, toys spread all over the floor are an ever-present hazard. For the sake of convenience, you might be tempted to store them all in one big box that you keep in the corner of the room - but Carter thinks that's unwise. "When your child is trying to look for that one toy, how are they going to find that toy? They're not going to find it easily because they have to chuck out everything else [in the box] to find it," she explains. "And then you're going to be stressed because all the other toys are now all over the place." She suggests having a few different, smaller toy boxes around your home that are categorised. They will help your child find the toy they're looking for more quickly and mean a smaller mess for you to clear up afterwards. "Whether it's cardboard boxes, baskets, clear containers - it has to be a system that makes sense for you and so that your children can find their toy."
The fourth mistake is mismanaging household paperwork. Another peril of trying to keep a tidy home is dealing with all the paperwork related to having a house to begin with - utility bills, council tax, TV licence, and all the other things in life that need paying for. Carter recommends sorting through these documents regularly, keeping important ones and discarding the rest.