You are no doubt by now loving the freedom of having a mobile home or caravan that you can visit for a holiday or an extended stay in the sun whenever you feel like it. However, your caravan may be a little more compact than your home, so it can be important to maintain some sense of order to ensure you don’t feel suffocated by clutter.
Every cupboard, shelf, nook or cranny can count when you’re staying in a caravan or mobile home, so getting organised can be key when it comes to making the most of your precious space.
It can be really easy to leave items on table tops or counters and in this way, your mobile home may soon be full of clutter which makes it hard to think straight, let alone get mobilised to cook a meal or put a nice outfit together for an evening of socialising.
Many people who spend a lot of time in their mobile home believe in having a place for everything and this certainly helps to make the most of the space you have available. Unless an item really needs to live on a bench or has a place on a shelf, then it should have a spot in a cupboard or a storage area where it lives. If it doesn’t have a proper home, then it can never be put away! A few items without homes can quickly build up to an unbearable level of clutter.
As space is limited in a mobile home, the time may have come to be ruthless about what you really need in there. It may be a case of whittling down possessions to the practical and the precious. Clearly, a few treasured photos or mementoes will give your holiday home or caravan some lovely character, but keeping a lot of unnecessary items will soon clog up any free space you have.
In the kitchen, there is probably little need to have 30 plates, for example. Keep enough for the numbers who eat there regularly and perhaps double that to cater for guests, and that may well be plenty. For cups and bowls, find items that are stackable to maximise space or you can get racks to add additional shelving space to your cupboards. There is little point in keeping utensils that are never used. Anything that is broken can be disposed of, together with items that may have been useful once but have outlived their usefulness. It may be a good idea to go through the pantry and throw out old ketchup bottles with half an inch of tomato sludge in the bottom!
If there’s an item in your kitchen cupboards – or any storage space – that hasn’t been touched in a year, then it’s likely that it’s no longer of any particular use.
Keep what is useful and necessary and donate the rest to charity or give it to friends. A similar principle can be applied to culling your wardrobe, where the general rule is if you haven’t worn a garment in a year, then you will probably never wear it again.
Keeping the bedroom is also a good idea, dodging items in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom is a recipe for disaster. You can vacuum pack clothing that is out of season to make more space in your wardrobe. Get a folder for any useful paperwork you need so that it is all kept together and throw out any old junk leaflets or bits of paper that you have accumulated but never needed.
The same goes for the bathroom. Get rid of items that are just taking up space and make sure old containers of cleaning products are used up and then recycled. There’s no need to keep four bottles of shampoo and six bottles of conditioner with an inch of product in the bottom of each container. Choose products that do the job well and get rid of the rest.
Choosing items that serve more than one purpose can be helpful in maximising space too. Collapsible tables that can be stacked against the wall when not in use are a good idea, as are sofa beds or armchairs that convert to sleeping spaces when guests arrive.
It’s also important to clean every day. This may sound like a bit of a chore, but doing this will quickly become a habit and then any mess will never seem overwhelming.
After a few weeks of putting things away in their proper places each day, doing so will become natural and easy and your home away from home will always feel spacious and welcoming. Clutter makes everything more tiresome to keep tidy and if the clutter is under control, then the cleaning will be too.
Keeping your caravan clutter-free is a lifestyle choice. It means keeping only what is practical and essential in your mobile home and getting into the habit of tidying things away. If you adopt this as a standard approach, then even the smallest space will always feel like home.
