The longer you live in a home, the more stuff that seems to accumulate. After a few years, it can start to feel cluttered and unorganized. As a result, sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves, dive into those overly full closets and mystery junk drawers, and declutter your home—but where do you start?
Make Piles
Start by making three piles. These piles will be “keep,” “toss,” and “sell/donate.” On round one, it’s easiest just to find things that are broken, expired, or otherwise unusable for some reason. On round two, the rule of thumb is if you have not used it in one year, toss, donate, or sell it.
Start Slow
You may find you have to go through things more than once to really narrow it down to what you need and want in your home. If you don’t have a ton of time to pull a whole-house clean-out extravaganza, it helps to take things one room at a time. For example, say to yourself, “this week I’ll do the kitchen,” then the following week pick a new room, and so on until your task is complete.
Start Small
If you find a whole room is just too much for your schedule, you can start even smaller with only one closet, cabinet, or drawer at a time. Granted this method often makes for more trips to the dump or donation bin, but it gets the job done.
Get Rid Of It
Be careful not to let your toss and sell piles get reintegrated into your home while you’re slowly sorting. In fact, it’s best to deal with these items as quickly as possible to avoid this. It’s easy just to shove things someplace when you need the space for another reason—your hard work can be undone fast.
On that note, if disposing of your unwanted items becomes a hassle, you might consider calling in a junk pickup service, such as EZ Queens Junk Removal. Junk removal companies will come to your home, pick up your junk, and deliver it where it needs to go—whether that be the dump, a recycling plant, charity, or otherwise. It’s a quick and responsible way to deal with things you no longer need.
Organize What’s Left
The final step is to organize what you’ve decided to keep. Just having less stuff does help your home seem cleaner overall, but organizing it is what really makes the benefits of decluttering shine—everything has its place, and it’s a place where you can find it. Plus, once you have everything tidy, it’s much easier to keep it that way. You’ll also find you have far more room in your home, and just feel less stressed overall.
Decluttering can be a bit of a task, especially if you have a lot to go through, but it’s undeniably a rewarding one. We hope these simple steps to get you started have helped.