We all know how Parkinson’s affect mobility. On top of that, Parkinson’s-induced tripping or freezing episodes can lead to sudden loss of balance and falls. Creating a safer clutter-free home environment can lower the risk of falls and injury in Parkinson’s.
If you do not have enough money to hire an occupational therapist, worry not. This blog can offer you some insightful ideas to live clutter-free in Parkinson’s. Like with all effective endeavours, this one, too, needs a carefully thought-out plan. It is recommended to take your caregiver’s help for physically exhausting tasks involved.
1. Get rid of unwanted stuff
Within your own home, there’s a new problem to tackle ‘too much unwanted’ stuff that just keeps lying around. Be ready to dispose of items/objects/belongings you have not used in at least 4 months. Get desk organizers, foldable wardrobes and portable shoe racks to make storage easy and make optimum use of space.
Alternatively, ask your caregiver to take two big trash bags. Get all old shoes and other miscellaneous objects that are past their use-by date thrown into one bag. In the other bag, read/unread books, old clothes, old luggage and miscellaneous things you think you might use in the next month stashed. If at the end of one month, you do not touch this bag, hand this over to the scrap dealer.
2. Look after kitchen chaos
If you cook yourself, start with the messiest part of the house – the kitchen. There’s a lot of clutter there and one easy way to get rid of it is by taking a big cardboard box and putting all your ‘extra’ utensils in it. Now, keep track of how many times in a week you needed one of these utensils. Do this for a month. Those that were used even once, can stay. The rest have no use and must go. We have also posted a dedicated blog on keeping your bathroom clutter free.
3. Arrange furniture smartly
The place where you live for hours is none other than your living room. A corner sofa, here, not just provides a layout to your room but also gives an idea of the setting of other furniture. Everything else can be placed accordingly to the corner sofa as the central point. Instead of having a separate corner for TV set up, you can think of keeping it on one of the shelves of the wall cabinet amidst other decorative items. Small round coffee tables also ensure easy movement inside the room.
4. Buy what you use
Last but not least, the thumb rule for a great-looking, clutter-free home is – use what you buy, buy only what you will use in the next few months. Not only does too much stuff make the house untidy and uncared for, it does the same to your mind space.
This Blog is contributed by Dr. Deepak Kr. Nain. He is a certified therapist who specializes in the field of rehabilitation. Deepak possesses a clinical expertise in prescribing the best solutions to help people with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS).