Welcome to Clean Sweep, news.com.au’s home organisation series featuring exclusive advice on how to declutter your home direct from Aussies who have spruced their way to success.
Felicity Meredith describes herself as a “serial organiser”.
Take one look at the pictures of her home on her Instagram account and you’ll see that she’s true to her word.
The 26-year-old has amassed almost 24K followers, who eagerly await new photos of her meticulously arranged abode.
She has attracted legions of fans in a relatively short amount of time as well, after posting the first photos of her new home 12 months ago.
The house — which she shares with her partner and a rescue kitten named Frankii — is a rental property in Perth.
The photo that catapulted her Instagram status was one of her beautifully organised pantry and a simple hack she designed herself.
Followers fell in love with the custom labels she’d attached to her canisters, but it was her clever spice rack hack that really struck a chord.
Meredith was keen for a wooden spice rack, but couldn’t find one anywhere, so she hacked Kmart’s $6 bamboo drawer tidys, by turning them upside down and stacking them in a tiered arrangement.
The photos of her carefully arranged linen cupboard have also been wildly popular.
APPRECIATING THE TRANSFORMATION
Meredith is an avid organiser from way back.
“I’ve always loved organising and decorating,” she said.
“My parents would laugh as I would always be rearranging and changing my bedroom as a kid.”
According to Meredith, she works best in a visual sense and loves being able to “see what I’ve accomplished”.
“My favourite part about organising and decorating a space is at the very end when you get to look around and appreciate the transformation,” she said.
“I love how even a few small changes can have such an overall impact in a space.”
SCANDINAVIAN AND CONTEMPORARY
She said she would love to get into home styling professionally, but for now “it’s just a nice creative outlet”.
In her spare time, Meredith watches YouTube clips of people rearranging parts of their home.
“To me, there’s something calming about watching something like that … everything being pulled out and reorganised,” she said.
She describes her home as a blend of Scandinavian and contemporary, counting Adairs, Freedom, Kitchen Warehouse and Mocka as her favourite places to pick up pieces.
She’s also not opposed to a bargain from Ikea, Target or Kmart.
“I would like to think what we have is still kind of affordable … it’s a blend of quality and more affordable pieces, she says.
PLAN OUT YOUR SPACE
Meredith advised anyone wanting to reorganise their living space to pick a single project, and crack on with it until it’s completed.
She said to complete one thing before moving onto the next.
“Sometimes people can get intimidated (by the job at hand) and so they don’t actually start,” she said.
“I strongly recommend that you declutter before you buy new storage — you’re going to waste money otherwise.”
To do this, she encouraged people to measure the space and envisage what they want to fill it with before purchasing anything.
“I’ve made that mistake before and ended up buying something that just wasn’t the right size for what we actually needed to store,” she said.
UPKEEP IS KEY
Meredith said the job is not necessarily done, even after you’ve overhauled a section in your home — it requires regular maintenance to keep everything in order.
“You might re-do your pantry but every few months you need to go right through it and make the time to have a bit of a reset,” she said.
“Because we’re constantly buying things and bringing things in … I’m still tweaking my pantry all the time.”
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Meredith says many of her fans commonly think that she spends a huge amount of her time tidying and cleaning.
Luckily, her partner is also a bit of a neat freak.
“I’m such a homebody and so is my partner,” she said.
“We are pretty busy during the week so by having systems in place that keeps things organised and clean, it means that we can spend more of our downtime relaxing and enjoying our home.”
CLEAN AS YOU GO
She said a big part of the couple’s cleaning regimen involves “cleaning as we go”.
“That’s really important. If everything has its place and you do it as you go it’s less maintenance in the long run,” she said.
“And you don’t have that mad rush to tidy everything up before someone comes over.”
Each Sunday, when she does her grocery shopping, Meredith sets time aside to decant the items into containers and put them in their proper place.
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She said Sunday is the couple’s “reset” day, where she goes through the house and does washing and maintenance.
She cites Japanese organisation guru Marie Kondo as her inspiration for her cleaning routine.
“I have read her book and have practised her method in parts of our home,” she said.
“One of my favourite quotes is actually one of hers which is ‘the space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past’.”
NEUTRAL PALETTES
Meredith said her home has a mostly neutral palette.
“We’re not really colour or pattern people, as we would get over it quite quickly,” she explained.
Even their rescue cat Frankii fits in with the colour scheme.
Meredith said the decor of her home is mostly her domain, although she does ask her partner for his thoughts, and they do pick pieces together.
“Thankfully we have quite similar tastes and don’t like too much colour,” she said.
“I like to keep our home quite neutral and a blend of our styles so that it doesn’t feel overly ‘girly’ and it feels like our home.”
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If she ever brings something into the house that is “horrific”, she said her partner would be very frank with her about it.
“About a year ago in our first rental I did a DIY hack on a Kmart pink mesh planter, spray painted it white and used it to store our magazines,” she recalled.
“He despised it. It lasted a few months before we got rid of it when we moved house.”
While Meredith’s home appears immaculate on Instagram, she says her house is not always perfect and that it was a work in progress.
“Just don’t go into my guest bedroom,” she said, with a laugh.
“It looks like a bomb’s gone off.
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