How to declutter

Up to this point I’ve gone through many things that you can do to declutter your home, but I have yet to give you any tips on just how to go about it.

So I thought I would start at the beginning: getting yourself into the swing of things. This is the first step you need to take in the process of decluttering your home, and often this is also the hardest step.

Most people need to be shocked out of their apathy, but some people will get to it through sheer will power. Others will find that they are sometimes galvanized by the insane desire to clean up house, and yet others still are motivated by something or other, to declutter their house.

Whatever works in getting you there is the right way to go, but for those of you who like to wait until the mood hits you, you want to be careful.

You’re not a clutter bug for nothing. If you haven’t felt the urge to declutter in a good long while, this can mean that you’re getting immune to the sight of all that clutter and that you can live with it, without a problem.

This is dangerous. Complacency about one’s clutter bug lifestyle can lead a person into deeper waters than they’ve been before. You could find that you’re going under for the last time and not even realize it.

You will definitely need to motivate yourself to get things moving, so move!

First things first

If you have made the decision that you’re going to declutter then get on with it. Like I mention later on, don’t procrastinate and put things off for tomorrow. It never comes.

Decluttering as an Art form

You might not realize it but decluttering is an art form, and this is where many people go wrong. They like to treat it like any other cleaning job, or boring must-do chore when this just isn’t true.

Handled the right way, decluttering can be fun and soul-releasing. Besides which there is very definitely a knack to getting your decluttering accomplished as you will find out.

Think small
To begin with you need to think small. Don’t try to dive into the deep end before you can swim, this way will lead to a very quick drowning of your decluttering efforts.

Don’t, whatever you do, go to tackle the worst cluttered room in your house first thing. This is probably the worst thing that you could do for yourself at this stage.

So think small. Start with something as simple as a magazine stand or a sock or underwear drawer. These are manageable things which you can finish in short order and get a sense of satisfaction about.

By the time that you finish this, you will feel a sense of triumph at having reached out and taken control of your life.

Set a Time Limit

Before you start, set a time limit on your decluttering efforts. Make an effort to stay (doing productive decluttering) until the time is up.

It doesn’t need to be an earth shatteringly long time, something between 10-15 minutes is the ideal for a beginning declutterer.

After you get through this, and you will probably need to do this for a few days to get into the swing of things, you can then up the ante and set your time limit higher.

If you feel invigorated and want to do more, then do so by all means. The only thing here is not to become dispirited and leave it before your allotted time is up.

Be Thorough

Don’t do a slapdash, slipshod job. Be thorough about what you’re doing, otherwise you will just end up having to do it again.

And there’s nothing more depressing than having to the same thing over and over again when there is no visible outcome.

Be Ruthless

If you haven’t used it, worn it or even remembered its existence in the past year (two years at the most) then you really should get it out of your life.

You have the option of either throwing it away, donating it to charity if it’s still in a good condition or placing it for sale in a garage sale of your own.

Afterwards

When you finish you first decluttering task, you should then move on to the next one. You won’t need to do this immediately, the next day is fine, but you will need to do it so that you don’t get out of the habit you’re trying to cultivate.

Don’t lose heart – decluttering miracles take time

It took you years and years to get where you are right now, and it took (maybe) years and years to clutter up your home, so don’t expect miracles now that you finally started decluttering.

A complete overhaul type of decluttering won’t happen overnight or even over the course of a day. It will take time and it will take effort but if you keep at it you will be able to make a sizeable dent in it within a month or two.

And this is decluttering on a small scale. If you up the ante even more, and take entire evenings once in a while to declutter your home, and even an entire morning or an entire day, you will find that you’re making larger and larger inroads into your clutter.

That doesn’t mean that you need to devote every single moment of your precious free time to it. It just means that you should expect to devote a small part of it everyday.

And the trick is to make it a portion of the day that you won’t miss. If that sounded confusing, it wasn’t meant to be. All I meant was that there are times in your day, or evening, which are thought of as in-between times.

These can be the times that you’re going from one activity to the another, but due to circumstances you find that you have about 5, 10, maybe even 15 minutes on your hands in which you can’t do anything productive.

You can’t work, you can’t relax because you’re still turned “on” and you can’t even have a cup of coffee.

During these non-productive times you can do a whirlwind dash through whatever decluttering you have in mind for the day.

This will help to ensure you stay on target and that you’re not wasting your hard won precious relaxation time.

Everything in its place

Everything in your home should have its own designated place. This applies to everything. If it doesn’t have somewhere it can call home, then it will end up as clutter somewhere else in the house.

And when this happens, you will probably notice a spiraling effect takes place. When one thing accumulates where it’s not supposed to be, others will generally follow suit.

One thing will lead to another and you will find that you have yourself a small center of clutter. This is where it all decides to congregate regardless of your wishes on the matter.

There is only one way to deal with this. Declutter! Take these things and put them in their rightful homes. If they have no homes, find them new ones. And if you just don’t like, or need it anymore, throw it away!

And make sure that your family knows that things have their own place and that they should be put back after use. This is an especially good idea to instill in the younger kids because they’re probably more trainable than your older ones!

What you can do with your junk

As always when you go through your house there will be things that you find you have collected over the years, but which ultimately do you no good.

They just sit there gathering dust and using up valuable free space which you could use to keep a room free of clutter.

When you do come upon these items make no mistake, you won’t be able to mistake them for what they are: your own personal white elephants.

You know the ones I’m talking about, things like that all-in-one kitchen grater that hasn’t seen the light of day since you bought it; the collection of funky cushion covers which you thought would look good, but which instead make you seem like a bad throw back to the seventies.

And let’s not forget the surplus of inflatable furniture that made the rounds a few years back! How many of those do you have stashed away in closets, awaiting the time when you might one day need them? And what about that…you get the idea right, need I go on?

These items are easily recognizable for being ones that are of absolutely no use to you.

However, don’t mistake those eyesore heirlooms and what-were-they-thinking presents from relatives as going in this mix. These items should normally have their own separate place in your house.

Preferably in a deep dark place which will never come to light for another thousand years, or until Great Aunt Matilda comes over asking what you did with that lovely candelabra she sent you as a house warming!

Then, if you have a problem with truth like I do – I can’t not tell the truth – you can answer truthfully enough that yes, you do have that very opulent and large, real silver candelabra which she gave you.

The fact that it’s in a box, which is in a chest, which is in the attic, which is two floors above you, is another matter entirely!

So what do you do with those other, disposable white elephants of yours? You have a choice here, so you can either,

· Dispose of them entirely and put them into the garbage can: good riddance to bad rubbish!

· Take everything to a garbage dump where you can liberate yourself even further when you get rid of everything at once.

· Go a step further and take everything to a charity where you can in good conscience leave everything there without having to think twice about it.

· Have a garage sale and watch gleefully as other people go through the same cycle you went through when you bought your white elephants.

What you do with your white elephants depends on you and where your inclinations lie. I personally had so many things to ultimately get rid of that I went through all of these options before I even made a dent in the white elephant clutter.

But I have to be truthful here and say that by the end of the whole white elephant process I had given up on carting things around to charities and the like, nor had I the inclination to continue with any more garage sales, two was more than I could feasibly handle.

The only place I was going to cart these white elephants to, was the dump yard and not a step further.

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