How to Declutter Your Home without Getting Overwhelmed

Hands down: clutter is overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be (that bad). Trust me, I’m something of an expert on the topic – because I have clutter. But I’ve also found a way to master it. I will show you how to declutter your home, even if it seems overwhelming.

I will guide you through it, one step at a time, with a checklist we will adapt to your home. We’ll divide the process into rooms and categories of items, no overwhelm. You’ll be proud. It will feel awesome.

Let’s dive in!

• Why the Heck Should I Declutter?
• Create the Right Mindset
• Prep Work:
  – The Room Plan
  – The Categories
• The Decluttering
• What to Do with Discarded Items?
• How I Decluttered My Living Room
• How to Stay Motivated

Image source: Samantha Gades, Unsplash

Why the Heck Should I Declutter?

We will address it all: your clothes, your electronics, that dead plant that’s been sitting on your window sill. (Yep, it has to go.) But why the heck? Here are four strong whys:

• Reduce stress & anxiety: Clutter is overwhelming, visually and mentally. And that results in stress and anxiety. You don’t know where to look, where to begin, you can never fully be at peace.
• Increase Productivity: Clutter makes it difficult to find what you need, which wastes time and leaves you frustrated. When you declutter you give everything its place (more on that later), so you can find things easily and gets tasks done much more efficiently and less stressful.
• Take back control: Have you ever felt like you’re helplessly drowning in chaos? Decluttering will help you regain control, which will then make you feel satisfied and proud (because YOU DID IT!).
• Sleep better: As if all of that wasn’t enough, decluttering can also improve your sleep quality! Say what? A cluttered bedroom is stressful, so your level of cortisol goes up. Cortisol is a stress hormone that makes it harder to fall and stay asleep. And we don’t want that!

Cluttered Home, Cluttered Mind.

Convinced? Great! Now all you need to do is follow my proven recipe for a decluttered home:

Create the Right Mindset

Letting go is hard. It really is, so I’m not going to tell you to just do it and never shed a tear.

It’s just that the end result is SO worth it.

So I am going to tell you that you can totally do it, even if you do shed a tear (or two).

Here are two lessons we can learn from the official decluttering master Marie Kondo:

• Discard ruthlessly
  Pick up each item and ask if it sparks joy. If not, thank it and get rid of it.
• Focus on the positive
  You’re not cold-bloodedly disposing of things. Instead, you’re choosing to surround yourself with the things that will bring you true joy.

We have so many things that take up space (in our home and in our mind), although we don’t really need them any longer. They sit on our shelves, collect dust, and add to the clutter. Let’s take action!

Image source: Luisa Brimble, Unsplash

Prep Work

By room or by category? Both!

We will declutter by room and by category:

THE ROOM PLAN

Save this Room Plan (or tap into your creativity and design your own). Add all the rooms you are planning to declutter.

The Categories

You’re doing great! Let’s keep up the momentum and add in the categories I mentioned earlier.

We will divide all of your clutter into categories so we can go through everything one by one.

Typical categories are:

• Clothing & Accessories
  Clothes, shoes, bags, hats, scarves, belts, luggage, and jewelry
• Home Goods
  Dishes, cookware, utensils, appliances, linens, towels, bedding, blankets, pillows, decor
• Paperwork
  Bills, receipts, bank statements, manuals, warranties, greetings cards, notebooks, planners
• Books & Media
  Books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, video games
• Electronics
  Phones, computers, tablets, cameras, TVs, game consoles, chargers, cords
• Food
  Food items, spices, condiments
• Hygiene
  Cleaning supplies, toiletries, personal care items
• Sentimental Items
  Photos, keepsakes, memorabilia, letters
• Miscellaneous
  Toys, tools, hobby supplies, sporting goods, office supplies, first aid kit, medication (unexpired)

You can customize this list to fit your specific home. If you have a large collection of something, you might want to break it down into sub-categories. Conversely, you can combine categories if that makes sense for you.

Now, using our Room Plan, take inventory of your home. Pick the room you feel might be easiest for you to declutter. That way you can gain momentum and start positive. (We’re still in the planning phase, don’t panic yet!)

Go through the list of categories. Whenever you see any item from one category in your chosen room, add that category to your room plan. That might look something like this (don’t mind my handwriting):

Almost done! Repeat the same thing for every room. You final Declutter Master Plan (much better name!) might look something like this:

Now it’s time to plan some storage space, because obviously we won’t get rid of every single thing you own – but everything you keep should have their designated space, their own little home so to speak.

Giving items a home makes it so much easier to keep your house organized. Instead of not knowing what to do with an item after using it (or finding it out of place), you know. You take it back, and that’s that.

STORAGE

Do you have enough storage space to give each item a home? Make sure you have shelves, bins, boxes, and/or containers ready. Give each of them a clear purpose (like a shelf for all your books). You could even label them if that helps you not to lose sight of the purpose. Putting ideas in writing helps consolidate them.

Image source: Lia Trevarthen, Unsplash

The Decluttering

We’re ready to declutter! Preparation is key, and we rocked that. Now we’re taking on each room, one by one. Choose one room, one room only. In that room:

• Focus on the quick wins first: Identify and discard easy-to-part-with items like anything that is expired or broken.
• Start with one category from your Room Plan Declutter Master Plan. Collect all the items that you can find for this category in this room, and pile them up.
• Pick up each item ONCE and decide if it sparks joy. Don’t come back to it later. Decide here and now:
  Does it spark joy?
  Yes = keep.
  No = discard.
• Repeat with the next category.

If an item sparks joy, give it a home. This is where it lives now! Whenever you use it, bring it back home when you’re done.

If you decide to discard an item, you have options:

What to do with discarded items?

• Donate them to charity
• Give them to friends or family, but only if they spark joy for them!
• Put them in a to-give-away box outside your house
• Sell them online, at a flea market, or at a local second-hand-shop
• Dispose of them, if they’re old, broken, and no longer usable

Even when it comes to something you were given as a gift?

If it doesn’t spark joy, be grateful someone went to the trouble of giving it to you, and then let it go. You will give and receive presents that aren’t perfect, it’s a part of life. Be grateful, but don’t let the gift clutter your space.

As long as an item is still good, it might spark joy for someone else. It might even be JUST what the person needed, and wouldn’t that be awesome?

If you can’t get yourself to get rid of everything that doesn’t spark joy, that’s fine, too. Go at your own pace, and remember: getting rid of some things is a million times better than nothing.

Cross one category after another off your list.

Doesn’t that feel awesome? You deserve to feel proud!

How I Decluttered My Living Room

Let me give you a real-life example. This is what my last decluttering session looked like.

I identified the following categories in my living room: Clothing & Accessories, Home Goods, Paperwork, Books & Media, Electronics, Sentimental Items.

clothing & accessories

I gathered every item from the Clothing & Accessories group in the middle of the room. Those were:

• A cardigan, a pair of slippers, a suitcase (yup, don’t know why I didn’t put that away when I came back from Chile)

Granted, three items isn’t a lot and I knew all three were keepers, so I put them back in their proper places. (At least the suitcase was already unpacked.)

Home goods

Then I moved on to the next category, Home Goods, and created a pile of these items:

• A throw blanket, four throw pillows, many decorative items (like a painting, two plants with flower pots, a scented oil diffuser, decorative books, vases, and bowls)

I picked up each item and many of them still sparked joy, but some didn’t. I decided to discard two of the pillows (the color didn’t resonate with me anymore), one plant (it was pretty dead), the scented oil diffuser (I just didn’t like it anymore), and a decorative bowl (I don’t think I ever liked it).

For everything that still sparked joy, I asked myself if they should get a new home. Some did, others didn’t, and – you guessed it – I put everything back in their (new or old) places.

I gave the two pillows and the decorative bowl away and threw out the plant and scented oil diffuser (it looked very worn out).

Paperwork

Now with paperwork, I don’t feel joy. There is no spark there. I ask myself if there is any chance I might need this particular document in its original version ever again.

So, I filed away all the documents I REALLY have to keep, took photos of documents that I only need digitally, and threw away some receipts and birthday cards.

Paperwork, hands down, is the most annoying category of all (at least for me).

So I took a break.

An oat latte macchiato later, I went through the rest of the categories:

books & media

I have a lot of books, and decided to give away three of them. Then I divided the rest into categories, and put everything back on the shelf, nice and organized.

electronics

I put my camera, which had been sitting on the coffee table, back in its place in one of my closets. Then I put back my iPad and phone charger. I had nothing to discard, so I moved on:

sentimental items

Another tough category for many! Luckily, I don’t keep a lot of sentimental items. So the only thing I found in my living room and discarded was a birthday present I had gotten a few years back and that no longer sparked joy.

And then I was done! See how fast that was?

How to Stay Motivated

If things get hard, remember to take it step by step. Do only one room at a time and you set yourself up for success. You will feel great after every single room, because you got it done!

But clutter is pesky, it comes back. Every decluttering session will be so much faster though, because:

• you get better at it, and
• you have less clutter to begin with.

However, it will take some time to make decluttering a habit.

More useful ideas

This is a random collection of tips some of which might help you. If something resonates with you, use it. If not, discard it (by now we’re experts at discarding).

• One in, one out: When you get something new, get rid of something old.
• Trash Tour: End (or start) your day with a trash tour. Grab a bin, do a quick tour through every room, and throw away everything that is trash.
• Black Bag: Use a black trash bag so that you can’t see (and second-guess) what’s inside. What’s gone is gone!
• Grab and Go: Keep decluttering essentials like trash bins and bags easily accessible to make it easier to get started.
• 5-minute-rule: Declutter for five minutes and see if you can get in the flow. Five minutes can do wonders, and five minutes is alway better than nothing.

You can read more about Grab and Go and the 5-minute-rule in my article 8 Instant Home Design Ideas for a Cozy Home.

PS: If you struggle with letting go of sentimental items, collect a few really important ones in a memory box, and take photos of the rest before letting it go.

That’s it!

This is how you declutter little by little, without complete overwhelm. Now I would love to hear from you! How has your decluttering journey been so far? Do you have a favorite decluttering tip you want to share with us? Let me know by leaving a comment below.