Just about everyone I talk with can tell me one area of their home that they need to declutter. Often we just don’t know where to start or how to declutter your home. I’m going to offer 5 unique and different decluttering methods for you to try in your home.
The saying “junk expands to the space allotted” is a known fact! Bigger closets hold more stuff and if there is space for more stuff, we will fill the closet with more stuff.
There comes a time when we have to confront our shopping and space filling tendencies head on. Those closets and cabinets and bedrooms full of stuff eventually start to overwhelm.
We get paralyzed by the thought of undoing the damage we’ve done to our mental and physical well-being by accumulating so much unnecessary stuff just because we could!
So now we get to decide how we’re going to approach the process of cleaning out these filled to overflowing closets and rooms in our homes. I have a few ideas on ways to tackle these problem spots so you can declutter your home and life!
Five Ways to Declutter Your Home
Pretend You’re Moving to Declutter Your Home
No other event in our lives forces us to confront the amount of items we have accumulated quite like moving does! Suddenly, we have a deadline to get every item in our homes situation in such a way that it can be transported from one location to another.
Every drawer, every cupboard, every closet, every unopened bin must be confronted! We have to decide what goes to the new place and what we don’t want entering the front door of our new dwelling.
This decluttering method may sound a little absurd, but imagine going through our homes and examining items from the perspective of whether or not we would want to go through the effort of boxing them up to take to another place.
Will this item be any more useful in a different home or apartment as it is in our current place?
Are these items valuable enough to us the we want to pay for their weight on a moving truck?
Most people who move and have the time and energy to purge before they tape boxes shut will discard a portion of the items they currently own.
If our belongings aren’t being used in one house, it’s highly unlikely that we will use them in the next! This comes from someone who has moved approximately 10 times since 2005!
Challenge Your Friends and Family To Declutter Your Home
Decluttering is more fun with friends (or family)! Even more fun if the challenge becomes a competition!
A quick google search would yield quite a few ways you could do this.
The Minimalist Game is a simple decluttering method where each day of the month you remove a number of items based on the date of the month. Example: On the 5th, 5 times are purged; On the 20th, 20 items are purged and so on.
Challenge each other to fill a certain number of boxes with items to donate within a specified period of time.
Set up a fun wager or plan a celebratory meal at the end of the challenge.
Or even more fun would be to make the rounds with your friends helping declutter each other’s houses. The host home provides snacks and drinks for their friends to remove black trash bags full of clutter from their house! Sign me up!
I’ve offered a Minimalist Game challenge with my Facebook Followers before. Maybe I should host another soon!
A Bag A Day Keeps the Clutter Away
This one is a really simple decluttering method!
Simply hoard a month’s worth of plastic grocery bags or buy a box of trash bags and go around your house every day to fill a bag.
And trash totally counts a filling a bag! At my house that’s about 6 bags a week!
The satisfaction of removing a bag a day of clutter would be amazing! Not only to accomplish the challenge, but knowing there are 30 bags worth of clutter gone for the house. Amazing!
The Bag technique could be used as a challenge with friends, too! Every night send each other a picture of your full bag of crap! Ha!
The beauty of this plan is the bag serves as a very tangible and visible boundary for how much stuff to get rid of each day.
Now, I suppose you could choose to use small bags. Likely that’s not a bad idea if you’re decluttering small items like tiny toys, electronic chargers and cords, or even crayons or other tiny tchotckes.
A bag is a bag, right?
Filing bags makes a great tactic for clearing clutter from your home!
The key to success for this method for decluttering is that the bags have to make it out of your house and car! They must be placed in the trash can or the donation bin!
Schedule a Declutter Marathon Weekend
Call it a self care weekend! Call it a mini-vacay and send your family away!
If you have a lot of junk to go through, if several rooms in your home are overwhelmed with stuff, if you have one large project that you know is going to take hours to get done, this is the method for decluttering for you!
Block out an entire weekend starting at 5pm on Friday until 5pm on Sunday.
Plan ahead to make sure you have all the supplies, food, beverages, etc. that you’ll need for the whole weekend so you won’t waste time driving and shopping!
Spend the weekend focused on your goal which is to declutter your home or whatever specific space you’ve selected for this weekend declutter marathon!
Work in chunks of time that are doable for you. I’d suggest 1 hour chunks of time with 10 minute breaks between each “session.”
Of course you’ll need to take breaks to rest and to eat, but set a timer during your breaks, or if you’re anything like me, your breaks will be never-ending!
Scrolling and reading the latest internet gossip is often a lot more fun than deciding what stays and what goes in your home.
To help you stay focused while you declutter, keep a piece of paper nearby to write down anything that comes to your mind you don’t want to forget or maybe a follow on project that pops up as you’re decluttering. I’m suggesting paper and pen because the moment you swipe on your phone’s home screen, it’s easy to get down a pointless rabbit hole!
By the end of the weekend, you’ll be amazed at how much junk chunking you can accomplish when you devote 48 hours to the task!
Practice Swedish Death Cleaning
Just this title sounds morbid, right?
In many ways, it is!
Ultimately we have to come to grips with our own mortality. We have to face the fact that none of us will live on this earth forever.
We’re all going to die, whether we want to admit it or not.
Swedish Death Cleaning is our way of unburdening our loved ones of the task of deciding what to do with our stuff after we die.
This method of decluttering is for our loved ones who will be left to deal with our messes once we take our final breath here on earth.
As we practice Swedish Death Cleaning, though, we are also freeing ourselves from the death grip (no pun intended) that our material belongings have on us in the here and now.
What is someone going to do with all of our possessions when we are no longer here on this Earth?
You’ll never see a hearse hauling a Uhaul trailer.
Tim McGraw has an old song called “Live like you were dying” that could offer us some really good wisdom and perspective on how we deal with our stuff!
Let’s do our loved ones a favor and deal with our possessions before they’re stuck with items they don’t want, but feel guilty getting rid of!
I hope these decluttering methods prove useful to you as you contemplate how to declutter your home.
I guarantee you won’t regret removing unnecessary items as you practice any of these methods!
No one ever regrets simplifying their home!
Which of these decluttering methods do you think you’d try?
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