Decluttering Technique
We need to declutter the whole house again. I fear that if I wait too close to the twins leaving for college that I won’t be able to part with anything that reminds me of their childhood. But every weekend is full, leaving no time to declutter unless I remove any downtime/decompression time from work. A catch-22. My advice: declutter your home deeply long before you’re facing down a life change.
Too late to take my own advice.
I read an article that removing everything from the room and putting back only the things you want to keep is better that removing things. So an addition mentality rather than a subtraction mentality.
But here’s how you do it: you start with one room and remove every single thing from the room. Everything. Wall decorations, furniture, everything. And you live with the empty room, desk, drawers, etc while the items are in another place. And then you look at the space and say, “What do I need to bring back into the room?” So maybe you go into the another room and grab a shirt. And that shirt gets to stay because you wear it immediately. Or you’re missing a notebook from your desk, so you take it back and put it in the drawer so you have access to it quickly.
But everything else you realize as you put things back slowly is unnecessary.
Isn’t this thought brilliant: “Before you do the hard work of decision-making and parting with things, you get to experience the joy of a fully decluttered space and, in the pursuit of getting rid of stuff, there is no greater incentive.”
Yes.
5 comments
Two other strategies that might be helpful:
1. Take a picture of things you want to remember but don’t necessarily want to keep/store. Then have an album made of pictures of your keepsakes. (I haven’t done this yet, but I like the idea. Usually, I want to keep stuff because it triggers a memory I don’t want to lose.)
2. If you can’t part with a lot of stuff, box it up, and throw it in storage. (This is the approach I took when packing up the nursery I never got to use. Of course, I didn’t know when I did this in December 2015 that I would still have it all boxed up in 2022… But I also didn’t know I would be moving so much! By the end of this summer, I will move out of storage, unpack, and try that first strategy while getting rid of stuff.)
Good luck!!
Removing absolutely everything from a room might be effective but sounds absolutely exhausting!
I need to declutter, too, but my biggest struggle is with boxes of assorted items that have been packed away to “deal with later.” They are now out of sight but not entirely out of mind, so I’m not sure that the suggested approach would work for me.
Hmmm – so, my clothes are just supposed to live elsewhere until I get around to wearing them again? How long is this process supposed to take?!
My strategy for decluttering
1. I’m sick of having all this crap!
2. Select some crap to get rid of.
3. Get drawn into nostalgia black hole
4. Give up and try again tomorrow
5. That’s it! I’m really sick of all this crap!
6. Pick a shelf/drawer/location and get rid of a bunch of stuff by putting it in a pile to give to Goodwill
7. Spend several weeks ignoring the pile
8. Remember that I need that thing that’s in the Goodwill pile. Pull it out.
9. Repeat for several more weeks. Think about having a garage sale.
10. Take the pile to Goodwill and be done with it.
I’ve been following a professional organizers from Calgary on Instagram, GoSimplified. This sounds like sort of a version of what she does: when they’re doing someone’s kitchen, for example, they empty out the cupboards. Then they group similar things together — mugs all together, spices all together, coffee supplies all together, snacks all together, etc. As they do that, they go through each pile/group and cull what can be donated or thrown out. Then they install storage systems like pull-out bins, drawer dividers, bins/containers, etc. and label them. Here’s her website:
https://www.go-simplified.com/
I agree with Phoenix about taking photos. That’s helped me feel a lot better about letting go of a lot of things I just couldn’t keep anymore.
Good gracious that sounds exhausting. Good in theory, but I don’t know if I could live with an empty room and everything displaced! I like to do one section of things at a time. Although we pulled everything out of the pantry to purge and reorganize, but that’s a tiny space. We also realized that we literally moved expired stuff from our old house. Sigh. This is actually on my list to do this summer… Declutter and purge purge purge!