While I would not consider myself a minimalist, I have significantly decluttered and minimized my household in the last several years.
Today, I wanted to discuss several tools, methods, or thought processes that will help you declutter your home this year. These are not my unique ideas. They are a compilation of ideas I have gathered from various blogs, books, and YouTube channels.
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15 Tips
#1 – Institute a No Buy Month (or week or year). If you really want to declutter your home, you need to stop the influx of stuff coming in. To do this, make a pact with yourself (and your family members) to avoid buying anything that isn’t a necessity for a set period of time. So yes, you can pay your bills, you can buy groceries, but try to keep it just to the bare minimum. Avoid buying anything that don’t NEED.
#2 – One In One Out. When you buy something, make a rule to eliminate a similar item. If you need a new sweater because our current favorite is all stretched out, be sure to actually donate the old one when you buy a new one. No keeping it, just in case.
#3 – Take Full Advantage of Garbage Day. When you take your garbage out, be sure the bag is full (or fill up a second one). Walk around your house and find things you don’t want anymore but aren’t quite up to snuff for donation. Because REALITY CHECK, – nothing should be donated that isn’t in REALLY good condition. Otherwise, nobody else will want it and you are forcing the donation center to toss out your garbage for you.
As you walk around your house you will likely find actual garbage that just didn’t get thrown in the bin yet. This could be expired food, wrappers, clothes that are stained or holey, broken toys, toiletries you stopped using, etc.
#4 – Schedule a Weekly or Monthly Donation Day. Then create a couple of donation boxes to keep in your house. Maybe one in your closet for clothes you put on and realize you don’t like (take them right off and put them in the box). Place one in a communal area of the house and then when you come across a kitchen utensil or household item you don’t use, put it in the box. On your designated donation day, drop off the boxes and replace them with new ones.
#5 – Create a Time Will Tell Box (place it in an out-of-the-way location). If you have clothes, kitchen utensils/appliances, or dishes that you think maybe you want to donate but you just aren’t sure, put them in this box so they are out of your living space. If you go back for them, you know you should keep them but if they remain in the box, it's safe to let them go.
Use # 3,4,5 together (for example - go into your kitchen with a garbage bag, a donation box, and a time-will-tell box and go cabinet by cabinet, drawer by drawer. You don’t have to do it all in one day. But use this method to slowly and systematically go through every area of your house. Don’t get overwhelmed thinking about this. Pick 1 room each month to work on when you have time. Just be sure to take out the garbage bags and drop the donation boxes off routinely. Don’t let that stuff pile up!
#6 – Paperwork Bin/Day to Process. If you get overwhelmed with paperwork, place mail, permission slips, RSVP requests, etc. into a pretty basket and then pick a day every week to go through it all. On that scheduled day, look through and pick out the things you need to be addressed this week – and do them. Everything else can wait.
# 7 - Pretend Your Floor is Lava. I think this one specifically comes from a YouTube channel I watch often called Minimal Mom. The idea here is that stuff on the floor looks like chaos to your brain and causes stress. Therefore, if you declutter nothing else, get stuff off your floors.
# 8 - Experiment with a Capsule Wardrobe. This is a great place to start decluttering, especially if you live with other people and the clutter is partially theirs. Your clothes are your clothes and you have complete control over them. For the last several years I have drastically reduced my wardrobe. I donated clothes that I didn’t really like, and I stopped buying new clothes just for fun. I shop for clothes very intentionally now. I don’t impulse buy clothes. However, while this has decreased my overall wardrobe size, what I just described is not a capsule wardrobe (although it is a great way to save money). A capsule wardrobe is a small subset of your wardrobe that you wear for just a single season. You try to keep it really small, like 30-40 items. This makes your closet and your dresser drawers neat and tidy, and it reduces decision fatigue. And spoiler alert, you are probably already dressing with a capsule wardrobe, because in reality we typically only wear 20% of our clothing. So get the other 80% out of your way. Watch this video or this video to learn more.
# 9 – The 90-90 Rule. This is meant to help you determine what you should get rid of. This rule means if you haven’t used an item in the last 90 days and you know you won’t use it in the next 90 days, go ahead and get rid of it. Does this work for everyone or everything? Certainly not. If you are talking about a spatula, then yes, this works. Winter coat? Not so much. I like to think of this as simply a reality check. Maybe for some items, it’s a 180-180 rule. Use this rule with discression.
#10 – Gather Data. If the 90-90 rule doesn’t work for you or for certain items in your house because you just don’t know when it was last used, you can try another method to gather data about when something is used. For clothes or coats, you can do the hanger trick, where you turn all the hangers around. Then when you wear an item, you fix the hanger when you put it back. Then after a few months, you can simply look at the hangers to know what you didn’t wear.
Or, for something like baking dishes, serving dishes, or pots & pans, go through the cupboard and put a sticky note on everything. Then the first time you pull something out to use it, remove the sticky note. At the end of a certain timeframe, you go back and reevaluate what still has sticky notes. Does that mean you have to get rid of something that still has a sticky note on it in a year? Of course not, these are your things, your home. This is just a means of gathering data.
#11 – 20:20 Rule. This guideline is useful for evaluating things you aren’t using but you're keeping “Just in Case”. This guideline suggests that if you are keeping it just in case, but you know you could replace it in about 20 minutes for about $20, you can probably let it go. It is so rare that we use our Just In Case items that you likely won’t ever replace it.
#12 – Will I Look For This? Meaning, if I found myself needing this item, would it even occur to me that I own it? I use this a lot for spare parts, junk drawer items, manuals, etc. If I needed a replacement piece for my French press would I go straight to Amazon and order one? Or would I think maybe I have one floating around my house? If I can’t remember how to change the filter on the vacuum, would I look for a manual or just go straight to Google? If it would never occur to me to look for the thing, toss it. However, if you decide yes, you think you would look for it, be sure you are storing said item where you think you would go to look for it!
#13 – Easy Does It Method There are a variety of ways to declutter, taking it in baby steps or going all it. Both have benefits and you will likely find that if you are serious about decluttering you will need to use a combination of these, depending on the space.
Let’s talk about Easy Does It first. With this method, you take on a small space. For this example let's say it's your bathroom closet. You grab your garbage bag, your donation bin, maybe create a small time-will-tell bin specific for bathroom stuff then walk up to your closet. In this method we aren’t pulling everything out of the closet, we are just reaching in, pulling out what we know to be garbage (expired medications, half-used products that we decided we didn’t like), pulling out things that can be donated (how many towels do you really need, right?), and maybe if you have any products that you bought or were gifted that you aren’t sure if you will use them or not (put those in the time will tell box.
Straighten it all up a little and then you’re done with that space. Take the garbage out, put the donations stuff in your car, and tuck the time-will-tell box in the back, out of the way.
This method is nice if you might get pulled away and not be able to finish. At any point, you can stop and you aren’t left with a huge mess on your hands.
#14 – There are many names for this method, packing party, hush your space, or All In…this is where you take everything out of the space that you are working on. Again this could be just a closet, or it could be a whole room. It sort of depends on the space, your energy level, how much help you have, etc. You will likely see bigger results with this method because once you pull things out, the amount of stuff will likely surprise you, and you will feel better about getting rid of more. You also have the opportunity to recognize duplicates, which you might not in the easy does it method. However, this method requires more energy. And, if you have to stop in the middle you are left with a big mess on your hands. That might be what you need to ensure you finish, or it could leave you feeling like a failure.
#15 – From the Minimal Mom – 5 Minutes Matters. Using the easy does-it method, you would be surprised about what you can do in just 5 minutes. So maybe you don’t have the energy or ability to spend a whole day decluttering your kitchen. Schedule a few 5-minute bursts throughout the week and you will be shocked at how much you can accomplish.
Bonus – Start Easy. When people talk about decluttering, their minds often go to pictures, grandma's china, and their kid's christening gowns. Don’t start there!! Start easy – start with your clothes, the junk drawer, your kitchen utensils, and your coat closet. Build your decluttering muscles and then eventually, slowly you will get to harder stuff.
Bonus – don’t know where to start? Evaluate Duplicates. How many bath towels do you really need, how many spatulas, how many sautee pans, how many sneakers? Because you still have one or some of those items, the risk of making a mistake is low. This creates a stress-free way to makes some space. Then move on from there.
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