14 Steps to a Decluttered Home

1. Declutter one room at a time, and start with your most difficult room first.  You will have a huge sense of accomplishment when you finish, and all other rooms will seem easy in comparison.

2. Start with a visible area of the room (rather than a closet or a drawer) to give yourself instant gratification.

3. As you go through your rooms, make a decision about each item.  Either give it away, keep it, sell it, or throw it away.  The more things you can immediately get rid of, the better.

4. Put together a plan for dealing with items you plan on selling.  You can plan a yard sale, sell items with eBay auctions, or list them on Craigslist.  But make a plan and stick to it.  It will also help if you set a date for a yard sale, or start listing auctions as soon as you have items to sell.

5. Use large trashbags to store items you plan to giveaway.  Once a giveaway bag is full, mark it ‘giveaway’ and immediately put it in your car.  The next time you are running errands, you can drop it off at a donation center and it won’t continue to clutter your home.

6. When you decide to keep an item, you must decide where it will be kept.  Do not allow yourself to keep anything that does not have a home.  You may need to buy bins or baskets to store items, but everything must have a place where it belongs (in an uncluttered manner).

7. If you have a magazine collection, go through each magazine, tear out the pages you want to keep, and store the pages in a 3-ringed binder.  Page protectors are a bit pricey, but are handy for quickly sliding in pages.

8. Mail  is great contributor to clutter, so make a 1 touch rule for every piece of mail that comes into your home.  Either file it, put it in your bill basket, or throw it away.  Don’t set it down on the counter or table.  Buy a shredder to shred credit card offers, and other sensitive mail pieces you don’t want to keep.

9. Are you a book hoarder?  Go through your books and bring the ones you won’t read again to a used bookstore.  They will either give you store credit, or cash for your used books.

10. Closets are wonderful places for storage, but you won’t have much room if your closets are packed with shoes and clothes you no longer wear.  A good rule of thumb is if you haven’t worn it in a year, chances are you aren’t going to.  Donate it, sell it, or throw it away.

11. Invest in a label maker.  I purchased one at Wal-mart for about $20.00 and it has been instrumental in helping me stay organized.  You can label your pantry, your file folders, your linen closet, your book shelves, your children’s toy shelves, your clothes shelves…you are only limited by your imagination.  The key is to help you and your family know what belongs where.

12. Get your kids involved.  Help them clean out and organize their rooms, and give them a system to keep it that way.  Use plastic bins to sort toys and small parts.  For younger children label bins with a picture, and older kids can label their own bins with words.

13. Purchase a file cabinet to store paperwork.  You can also use the file cabinet to store user manuals for your appliances, your bills, and office supplies.

14. Don’t expect your home to be decluttered in a day.  After all it has taken years for the clutter to accumulate. Set a goal for youself and declutter a little bit everyday.  For example,  set a timer for 1 hour and work diligently the entire hour.  Remember, the best way to eat an elephant is one bit at a time.

What are your best decluttering tips?

Tags: featured, how to declutter, organized home

Category: Organizing