Decluttering: Tips, Tricks, and Where to Donate
The holidays have passed and 2020 is off to a crazy start! Your Christmas decor is probably taken down (no shame if it’s not, it’s so pretty), and you’re probably back in the gym working on your New Year’s Resolutions. But if you’re like me and subscribe to the ‘everything has a place and everything must be in it’s place’ mentality, you probably found it difficult to even find ‘the place’ for all those Christmas gifts among all the other stuff in your house or apartment. For some reason, I believe ‘spring cleaning’ is overrated, and I propose that we highlight ‘winter purging’ as a more appropriate practice after the holidays! And I know we all have that one Monica closet that definitely needs a good cleaning out.
Winter is the perfect time to declutter and find new ways to organize your home. After all, the temps are way too low to do anything productive or fun outside which means more time to lounge around at home. I know the KonMari Method of organizing and decluttering took the world by storm a couple of years ago, and I understand where her methods are successful, but if you’re just starting out doing a major declutter or you just find the whole process overwhelming, hopefully these tips and tricks can help you out when tackling what seems to be an impossible project and make it more manageable. I’ll also leave some resources from a local organization company, The Baer Minimalist, on where to donate your items once you’ve finished decluttering.
1 | Break it into chunks
Decluttering can seem like an insurmountable task if you look at it broadly, but breaking it into a process that is more organized can help a lot and make you feel less anxious about it. Here are some ways in which decluttering can be broken into chunks:
Calendar style - Some people use a blank calendar and mark each day as a different category of decluttering, for example, lets say on the 1st of the month you’re going to go through your sock drawer, on the 2nd your workout clothing drawer, the 3rd your kitchen utensils, and so on. This helps make it all a lot more manageable and helps fit in cleaning up into a busy lifestyle.
Room by room - This can be great for a weekend when you don’t have much going on and can devote a lot of time to the process. Of course, each room can also be broken down into even more chunks that create more organization and streamline the process.
Categories - This is kind of like the calendar style, except a little more broad with more freedom for what kinds of categories you can create. One could be clothes, one could be bathroom toiletries, or even pet supplies. This makes it manageable and gives you the ability to do it throughout the week if you don’t have time to do it all at once.
Material type - For the extra nerdy museum people like me, you can break up your decluttering by material type. So let’s say you’re going to go through all textiles and fabrics: you’re going to drag out your clothes, towels, sheets and bedding, and even blankets. This can be easy to do because the first thing we often think of when we even look at an item is its material type so it can be easy to go around your house and declutter those categories one by one.
All at once - This is for when you have tons of time to dedicate to this and preferably if you have some help, but I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re feeling very overwhelmed in the beginning
Be sure you’re also breaking your time into chunks! Decluttering burnout is so real and you don’t want all of the motivation you have go to waste because you didn’t give yourself breaks.
2 | Condense
Sometimes the easiest thing we can do with decluttering is to condense items into smaller areas or spaces that make more sense in order to save space in the future or free up a storage tote. This is one of my favorite ways to declutter because I end up finding so much more that I want to get rid of and the feeling of emptying a tote is near to heavenly. When condensing items, be sure to ask yourself these questions:
Can these items easily be placed into one box instead of two?
Do the items need to be separate for a certain reason?
Does it benefit your organization to leave these items in separate containers? Will other people be able to find these items if you move them?
What kinds of condensing storage items can I find, make, or purchase that makes vertical storage more of an option?
Does condensing save me time and space or am I overwhelming myself even more by trying to make it happen or avoiding other things that can be done?
Sometimes condensing may not be worth it depending on the organization system you prefer or you may have a lot of family members who would never find their favorite oven mitt if you moved it two inches to the left, so use these tips to your discretion.
3 | Give yourself emotional space
One of the biggest obstacles people run into when decluttering is running into items of sentimental value that make it hard to continue the process. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s old tea kettle but you’re more of a coffee drinker, or letters from an ex boyfriend that you can’t seem to get rid of. I think it’s important to remember these things when coming across these kinds of items:
Just because you are a different person now, doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the person you were
Things affect us for a reason (museum people know all about objects and the hold they can have on us) and this is totally normal and understandable
Sometimes the only way we can heal from things may be to keep them, or get rid of them
I know that my boyfriend and I both have our own ‘memory boxes’, and we use them to store all kinds of things that meant a lot to us in the past, but may be just trash to someone else. For example, I kept all my restaurant and museum visit receipts from when I went to France and Spain in 2015, and while I don’t keep restaurant receipts from the cafe I visited yesterday in Indianapolis, these receipts hold a lot of sentimental value for me so I keep them in a particular box to look back on and reminisce. I don’t think that we absolutely have to keep items like this (unless they are truly affecting your mental health) and we should give ourselves emotional and mental leeway when it comes to sentimental items.
So, I’ve tore through my entire home and now everything has a place and everything is in its place, now how do I keep it this way??
Keeping Up
This is one of the hardest things to do - the part that comes AFTER the decluttering. Here are some tips to help you maintain that beautiful organized home you got going on:
BE DILIGENT - I understand this is way easier said than done and I don’t have perfect organized days every single day, but literally just putting things back in the spot they came from when you’re done with them can make a world of difference. I saw a meme floating around Instagram saying “my 2020 resolution is to put my clothes back on the hanger after wearing them” and it’s really that simple and can save you so much stress!
PICK A DAY TO CLEAN UP - Maybe life is crazy and you don’t have time to implement the first point (or you have kids and that just isn’t an option), pick a day to clean up and maybe follow along with the system you used to break decluttering into chunks. This can also be a great way to reevaluate if your system is working or needs some tweaking.
MAKE IT FUN - Nobody likes a messy home, but not a lot of people like organizing either. I definitely get why most people dread it because it just seems like another task on top of all the things we already have, and sometimes it can be a reflection of our mental state, which isn’t fun to think about either. But finding ways to make decluttering and maintaining organization fun will make it easier to keep up with. Timing yourself and seeing how fast you can clean up, challenging your partner to see who can empty a tote the fastest, or showing your kids where their toys go and making a game out of it brings the joy back to decluttering, making things a lot easier.
You’ve sold me, I’ve decluttered everything and now it needs to go - what is my next step? Can I cash in on some of this? I don’t want things to go to waste or contribute to climate change with my trash.
Next Steps
The best part about decluttering is sometimes people actually want the stuff you don’t want! And the best part about 2020 is there are a lot of platforms for you to sell your unwanted items. Here are some ways you can make money from decluttering:
Apps like Poshmark and DePop
Plato’s Closet (takes gently used and trendy pieces for cash)
Facebook Marketplace
Instagram feed posts or stories
However, if you are looking to make some charitable donations (which can be written off on taxes) you probably know Goodwill is the classic place everyone takes all their unwanted items. However, more unique items like TVs, furniture, or even cars need to go to special places. The Baer Minimalist has an amazing resource on “Where to Donate Just About Everything in Indianapolis” on their website compiling all the places that you can take your items that I will leave below and hopefully this can help you out when you’re stumped on how that old tractor should be donated or where to recycle old and outdated electronics. This helps our pockets and our environment in amazing ways so definitely look into all your options!
I hope this post helped you get some motivation and on those cold winter days that will inevitably last until March or April, you can look back on it and refer to these tips to guide you along the process.
This is the finished product! It may still look cluttered but the way it is set up is so much more organized and SAFER! Less stacking means less falling. We will end up getting some shelving to put the bags on and find a new place for the vacuum so we can step into the closet!
