Decluttering

Here’s the thing about stuff—even when we don’t need it, it’s easy to become attached to it, assign meaning to it or feel guilt about getting rid of it. Gifts from loved ones or an expensive purchase you regret but can’t return can weigh you and your home down. So, what do you do when you feel like you can’t part with anything you own—even when you have multiples that you don’t need?

Whether you crank up the Christmas music the second Halloween’s over, or you restrain yourself and stick to fall decor at least until Thanksgiving, now is the time of year that your bins of holiday decor have come down from the attic or out from under the guest beds. Rather than waiting until it’s time to put it all back and bemoaning the amount of stuff you have that, once again, you didn’t use, go through it now.

Nothing turns a happy chef into a frazzled one like rifling through drawers or disassembling the kitchen to dig out the necessary tools. Don’t let this be you at Thanksgiving. For a smoothly running kitchen — and, more importantly, a smiling cook — eliminate everything that doesn’t need to be in your kitchen before the big day.

We’re all busy, but we can probably all spare 10 minutes or so, right? Just a few minutes a day is all you need to keep your home clean and in order—and if you don’t believe it, we’ve got proof. The guide you need to turn you into a believer? “Simply Clean,” a new book out this year by Becky Rapinchuk (aka Clean Mama).

I’m a stress cleaner—as in, I tend to clean and organize things when I’m overwhelmed or feeling down. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my emotional clean-out sessions, it’s that the sometimes the most satisfying thing on the planet is cleaning out your closet—even if it’s hard for you to part with some of your old favorite clothes.

We talk about getting rid of stuff all the time and laud the benefits of getting more and more things out of our homes. Freedom! Negative space! Less to clean and organize! While these are all most definitely positive effects of shedding excess, it’s possible that in our maybe-too-hasty pursuit of an ideal that may or may not be your own, we have some casualties, we lose things forever at our own hand and then feel the pang of missing them.

Paring down and living a more minimalist life sounds amazing in theory, but when you’re a “stuff” person—someone who owns a lot of things and tends to form emotional attachments to them—it can be a serious challenge to downsize.

In general, the process of going through your things and letting go can be difficult, but it becomes even more of a struggle when you’re dealing with grief and trauma in the process. Going through a bad breakup with someone you live with, or dealing with the loss of a loved one, for example, often come with the task of going through things and deciding what to keep (and who gets what) and what to get rid of.

There’s something about the switch from summer to fall that inspires a shift in thinking. Maybe it’s the temperatures dropping, or the leaves starting to change, or maybe it’s just that the kids are back in school, but September has always felt to me like a transitionary month. Like a fresh start in the middle of the calendar—where you can redefine your life and your home without waiting for January to come along. So we’re going to harness that motivation this year!

Some people just aren’t “stuff” people—they’re born minimalists who just don’t acquire much and seemingly don’t get attached to their things. But there are plenty of us who are stuff people. It can be because we assign emotional value to things that makes them hard to let go of. For others, it may be that we just don’t like parting with things we’ve spent money on.

How often do you quickly tidy one area of your home by just moving the mess somewhere else? Have you ever come home only to put your coat on a chair temporarily before you finally hang it up in the closet? (I know I’m guilty of this, because it just feels easier in the moment after a long day). It might not feel like a time suck, but it actually makes you put in more effort in the long run—all those steps add up, and it makes keeping your home clutter-free a slightly harder task.

The most powerful tool in your decluttering arsenal? It’s your mind. Truly, when you seem to have a problem with “too much,” the biggest obstacle in the way of getting rid of needless things is your own brain. It’s there in the background insisting, maybe, that you’ll wear that ill-fitting dress some day again, or that this old broken lamp is the last thing that connects you to the memory of your grandparents’ condo.

Decluttering a home is never easy. The thought of organizing a packed hallway closet or a stuffed storage room can be exhausting enough to make you put it off for another year. But what if we told you there was an easy, foolproof way to finally get your clutter under control that won’t take more than a few minutes of your day? All you have to do is remove one thing—just one thing—from your home that you no longer need – every day .

Raise your hand if you wish you could clean your home faster, but you just don’t know how to make it work. (I’m raising my hand along with you, if you couldn’t tell). The good news: Housecleaning pros, former messy people and the like all weighed in on Reddit with their best speedy—but effective—cleaning tips. Below are some of the best methods and tricks from the thread that might help you reduce your cleaning time and clean more effectively.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of getting into a decluttering groove, of riding the high of letting go of things, of piling the back of the car high with bulging bags bound for anywhere but the over-full garage. But that’s not the end of it. Once the excitement subsides, you’re left with a space that has, well, space and you’ll begin enjoying the benefits of a life with less.

While our dream homes are clutter-free sanctuaries that would make Marie Kondo proud, our real homes are where we store our mismatched bedding sets, bulk paper towels from Costco, and Backstreet Boys CDs from circa 1999. To keep all of this mess out of sight and give the illusion of an organized home, try one of our favorite DIY clutter concealers. Curtains, roller shades, no-sew table skirts—these are the easiest ways to keep the chaos under wraps.

In an effort to streamline their lives, many people seem to be turning a reactionary ship from a habit of consumption to a fascination with minimalism. But the fact that minimalism even exists as a movement bespeaks of our luxury to choose to own less. Not that the ramifications of such a choice aren’t beneficial. Far from it.

My best friend Erin is a 20-something with a teenage dream of a room—her love of pop music, Archie comics and traveling is plastered all over her walls in the best way. Her room is lived-in and cozy—full of patterns and textures and personality—so much so that when you walk in you can tell immediately, without a doubt, who it belongs to. Making her bedroom her own has never been a challenge for Erin, but the one thing she has struggled with is getting it clean and organized.

No matter how much you want to live more simply, it can be hard to part with your things. First of all, if you have a lot of stuff, where do you even begin? And what if you need these things again for some unforeseen hypothetical situation in the future? Will you be kicking yourself for throwing them out now? One simple system might help you sort it out: the 90/90 rule from Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, the duo behind The Minimalists.

A “one-in, one-out” policy is a super-logical way to keep our homes from becoming overrun with clutter. The concept is simple: Did you just pick up three new tops? Choose three to say good-bye to. But the theory isn’t always easy to put into practice, especially when online shopping can make our mailboxes a gateway to the surging tide of stuff. Well, now there’s a new way to keep the clutter in check, one that’s almost as easy as clicking Buy It Now.

I have some things that have been sitting in drawers and closets for years and—while I don’t need or use these things—I am pained to part with them. Some are inherited, some were formerly important, some never made sense, and a lot are scraps: of papers, events, good days, and really amazing trips. They’re little material bits of my life that sit in drawers or the back of closets. And I’ve never figured out how to part with them.

Luggage is just one of those things that tends to take up a lot of space, and when you live in a small home, you know how hard it is to find a place for small trinkets, let alone huge trunks and suitcases. Whether you’re a frequent flyer or just take a trip once or twice a year, you probably own at least a suitcase or two, so here’s how to make use of them when you’re not on-the-go and where to hide (or display!) them when you’re settled in.

When you go from a larger home to a smaller one (no matter how big the size difference), it has a big impact on the way you live. You usually can’t fit as many things in the smaller home, and the way you physically move in and use the smaller space might change, too. These folks recently relocated to smaller homes for lots of different reasons, but they all agree there are both benefits to downsizing — as well as a few downsides, too.

That college-age poster of the movie “Scarface.” A collection of terrifying (possibly haunted) Victorian-era dolls. The nine-year-old chair that’s just rags and bones. When you move in with a romantic partner, you inherit not just the stuff of theirs you like, you inherit weird things they’ve held onto for years. Who hasn’t fantasized about “accidentally” losing/throwing away/setting on fire something really yucky that belongs to your partner?

No matter how long you’ve been dating someone, the ending is never fun. It can leave you feeling sad, confused and angry — and frankly, sometimes you just don’t know what to do with yourself. Often our post-breakup instincts fall somewhere between wallowing, wanting payback or finding something productive to focus on instead.

Your garage is guaranteed to be the messiest place in the house —a place to ferret away junk and keep closed and off-limits when company comes over. It’s a holding vault for the kids’ old toys and items you borrow from neighbors and plan to return…eventually. What do you toss*, and what do you keep? How do you organize it all so the clutter never takes over again? Here’s a handy guide to see you through the decluttering process.

Cleaning isn’t really all that fun, especially when you have to do a total overhaul of your home all at once. To keep dirt and clutter from building up over time, it’s a good idea to follow a few simple cleaning and organizing rules on a daily basis. That way, you do a little bit of picking up each day and avoid doing a whole lot of cleaning later on.

It’s our last full weekend of the Cure and this final push is a bit of celebration of all the control you’ve gained over your space, habits and stuff this month. We’re celebrating by letting go – yes, it’s finally time to empty the outbox. It’s important to follow through at this point and really get the stuff that you’ve determined you no longer need or want OUT which is why I’ve dedicated a full weekend to this assignment.

Many of you doing the January Cure are graduates of previous Cures and/or long time readers of Apartment Therapy, and if so, might have already done a version of today’s assignment at some time in the past. If so, stick with (and bear with) me, when I let the new Curers know – this is one assignment that is worth doing, NO MATTER WHAT.

Have you ever noticed how, when you see rooms from your home in photos, they often look (and feel) quite different to you? I believe that’s because seeing your home in photos is a bit like seeing it through someone else’s eyes. You notice things that you simply just don’t “see” anymore in day to day life. This non-seeing phenomenon allows stuff to build up, making the space less streamlined and less effective in design.

One of the experiences that I try to fit into the Cure is how good it feels to shine a little light on parts of your home that you don’t deal with on a daily basis. Spending a bit of time and attention (just once a year or so!) on the maintenance of places like your linen closet or the under the sink cabinet in your bathroom or kitchen is good for your home and for your soul. Knowing that worn out things and clutter are hiding behind closed doors is a bummer, clearing them out is a boost.

Make no mistake about it: when you’re selling your house, potential buyers want to see everything. That means no area of your home (not even your utility closet) is safe from the gaze of a serious house hunter. That’s why it’s crucial to maximize every square inch of your place—backyard shed included—by minimizing your overall clutter.

Stop right there! Before you throw away your next empty toilet paper roll, consider this: with a little effort, you can probably get so much more use out of it (and keep it out of a landfill). From keeping unruly cords at bay to organizing your favorite makeup tools and jewelry, those cardboard tubes can come in incredibly handy. So, sure, you could toss it in the trash, or, you could use it to make your home a more beautiful, organized place with these projects—you decide.

Okay, so you’ve got a few minutes before the newest episode of your favorite show comes on—how do you spend it? You could flip through the channels to find something random to watch until it starts, or, you could work towards making your home a more beautiful, organized place (and make your life a little bit easier). Need inspiration? Try one of these quick tasks… Are your books actually organized, or do you just place them wherever you have room on a shelf?

Leading the January Cure for the past few years has taught me so much. We humans all really love a fresh start and really really want to make our homes cleaner and more organized, but the concept of trying to get everything under control all at once, on our own, is simply too BIG. So, we don’t even want to start. But, once it’s broken up into smaller bits, readers tell me they often want to keep on going after after completing a task. They actually want to do more, not less.

When you have a tiny bathroom in your home, you know that how you use your space is of the utmost importance. Unless you’re clever about how you arrange things and where you store your products, your bathroom can quickly become an out-of-hand mess. And even the nicest, sleekest, most-organized bathrooms can have a dirty little secret—a messy cabinet under the sink.

So, you’re a “stuff” person. It’s okay—a lot of people get emotionally attached to their things (myself included!) to a point where it’s hard to get rid of anything that has any sort of meaning to it. But you probably know, on some level, that collecting things you don’t need and don’t use can lead to a ton of clutter, especially if you live in a small space or lack an abundance of storage.

You wouldn’t trade your favorite curling iron for anything, and yet, you probably don’t even have a designated storage space for it. Keeping your heat styling tools clean and organized is important for more than just aesthetic reasons—having a safe place to store them will help them last longer, since easy organization means no more destroyed cords and damaging falls from the countertop.

Marathon runners will tell you that the last mile is the toughest. And so it goes (in, admittedly, a lesser way) for organizing your apartment. The journey from kitchen or closet to a box by the front door might feel like a mission in itself, but getting that box out to a donation center, resale shop or just to the recycling—that might be even harder.

Cleaning out your closet is a really big task. There’s a lot to unpack, pun slightly intended, when you determine your wardrobe needs sorting—just deciding to get rid of a few pairs of jeans might send you on a tailspin through everything from sentimental memories to body image issues.

Your bathroom may possibly be the only division of your small space with four walls and a door, so it’s not totally surprising that a lot of clutter ends up settling inside the bathroom to hide. Couple that with the fact that your bath and beauty kit is likely the last thing that gets refreshed (Do you know when your mascara expires? Do you?), and you’re looking at a bonafide problem area. Today, we clean it out for good.

Living small has its disadvantages—and the biggest one just might be how a tiny apartment seems to magnify your mess. If you’re going to be a small-space dweller, you have to be ruthless: sorting through your things on a daily basis, deciding with a swift hand what stays and what goes (and most of it should go). If that daily practice has escaped you for, say, the last several months—It’s OK.

Quick: Name one thing you buy all the time but never have when you need it. You’re thinking about hair elastics, aren’t you? If you have long hair, hair elastics can be the bane of your existence. They’re so helpful, and yet, so hard to keep track of. It feels like no matter what you do, your hair ties are always disappearing.

Growing up in Miami, my friend’s mother had a sofa in the living room that was just for looking at. Never for sitting on. It was embalmed in a plastic slipcover to prevent it from being ruined with a spill—something that would have dealt a death blow to its primary utility. I don’t believe a home should work that way. Sofas should be sat upon. And dining room tables, should you be lucky enough to have the space for either a proper one or a not-so-proper one, should be sat at.

Here’s a survival tip akin to the tagline of “Alien”: In a studio, there’s nowhere to hide your mess. While one-room living demands that you keep a clean home, there is less to clean, generally. That means you can make tidiness just another part of your daily routine and be one of those people who never has to clean because they’re cleaning all the time. While you’re brushing your teeth and getting ready for the day, add these two tasks to your morning flow.

Imagine for a second that you’re a superhero—Professor Neat Freak. Your archenemy? The Clutter Coalition and its most powerful agent, Mail. But fear not! You have a secret weapon in your arsenal to defeat your tidy home’s biggest nemesis. One rule… It’s that simple. Incoming mail takes over your home by spreading across tables and countertops when you’re not yet ready to deal with it. But the thing is, you never deal with it.

I recently moved to a new place, and most of my things came with me. The moving process gave me a much-needed opportunity to survey the things I own and decide if I wanted to keep them and bring them to the new place, or find a new home for them (which, yeah, includes the trash can in a few instances). It was tough to decide what would stay and what would go, but one question helped me along the way: Imagine you’re in a store, holding the object in your hand.

There’s no big secret to keeping an impeccable home. It just requires diligence. So we put together a five-part plan that targets the areas of your home most likely to collect dirt, grime and clutter. If this list is all you get to do in the day, consider it a major win, and know that you’re making the best of your homekeeping time. Nothing will take over your home faster. Nothing. First, go through today’s mail and shred or toss unneeded mail into trash or recyling bins.

“You’re born messy and you die messy, but someplace in between you get bullied into believing that you should be neat and organized,” says writer Jennifer McCartney in her hilarious book, The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place. Bravely rejecting the KonMari method and other trendy tidy-up plans, McCartney proposes a revolutionary (albeit tongue-in-cheek) system for accepting your own clutter.

Of course, there never is a magic bullet for anything. Having a clean, organized home takes effort, no lie. But, it is possible to help keep your place more firmly on track by spending just a couple of minutes on it each day. No matter how clean and well organized a room actually is, it can look and feel like the opposite when the surfaces are cluttered with everyday stuff.

On your mark, get set, declutter! You can speed your way through this assignment in an hour or less today. (You might even want to try using the timer method again, just for fun, if you are dorky like me.) It shouldn’t take too long and once you cross this self-contained, one-shot task off your list, you’ll have a more pleasant, easy, speedy start to each and every day for months to come. Time invested today: minimal. Upcoming time (and aggravation) saved: a bunch!

We all know someone whose home is always mysteriously, maddeningly clutter-free. How do they do it? Maybe they just don’t have any stuff. Maybe they incinerate everything right before anyone comes over. Or maybe they have a few secret weapons. Here are three of your most important allies in the fight against clutter. If you are trying to get rid of clutter, drawers are almost magical.

After a while, you get so accustomed to seeing the things in your home that you tend to gloss over cluttered spaces because they seem normal. So we’re getting really, really specific. Are you guilty of storing any of these things that you don’t want or need? The groceries are long gone; their day is done. Is your linen closet keeping up with your furniture? Why are you still storing that frizz-inducing shampoo?

Many of us strive for a more simplified life, in which what surrounds us are things we either truly love or truly need, preferably both. To arrive at — and to maintain — such a lifestyle, we have to get rid of things, whether it’s in one fell swoop or in small doses. While it feels like a big mountain to climb, getting rid of things ultimately feels sooo good. Here’s why. Physical space and mental space go hand-in-hand.

I live in Chicago so layers are a lovely fact of life here. Sweaters are both a fashion opportunity and a warmth necessity and while there’s no reason to fight it, that doesn’t mean all knitwear is good knitwear. It can get pilly, shrunken, holey and plain old worn out. Today, we’re going to start the Closet Cure off in a relatively small and manageable way and sort through just your sweaters. Let’s go.

Storage space in the bathroom is always at a premium, and if you’re like most people, your bathroom is probably full of things you don’t really use. The good news is that cleaning all that stuff out doesn’t have to be time-consuming or involve a lot of agonizing decisions. Just take ten minutes and follow this handy guide. Here are a few things that have no place in your bathroom: 1. Towels that have seen better days.

One of the our biggest emotional blocks against reducing clutter is nostalgia! We want to keep remembering the great things that happened to us while wearing that sweater or the time in our lives when we loved those plates, so we hang on to stuff that we no longer need. But guess what? You don’t need the actual items to keep those great memories at the front of your mind. Try these ideas.

I had the most transforming (literally) moment not too long ago when I took a bench out of my bedroom. While I had styled it lovingly with a comforting and cozy vignette and it technically fit in the spot it was in, it made my room feel cramped. Or at least, I didn’t realize it felt cramped until I moved it to another room in my home and breathed in the fresh air of a roomier, more wonderful bedroom!

Decluttering maven Marie Kondo has inspired us all to live, not only with less, but with only the things that spark joy. Her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is full of inspiration and instructions about how to make your home the streamlined, joy machine it can be and, notably, warns against one specific thing (that we do all the time!). We wouldn’t have thought of this one but it’s so true.

Shopping for just the right thing for your home can be a bit of a rush. You’ve searched for so long, and now, at long last, you’ve found it. Your skin is tingly. You hear the faint sound of angel choirs. But wait! Before you buy anything (be it online, at the flea market, at a garage sale, or at a just plain old store), ask yourself these five questions. Will it fit? In shopping, as in relationships, we sometimes like to think that love is all you need.

For better or worse, one thing the digital revolution has done is enable us to have fewer things. Of course, our phones alone have eclipsed the need for many other electronic tools (cameras, CD players, etc.). It’s amazing! But what about the things in our world that persist in physical form, things that don’t give us joy in our space and can easily a growing mass of clutter if we’re not meticulously organized?

Chances are, you’ve heard of Marie Kondo by now. Her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, seems to be everywhere these days. If you haven’t heard of Kondo’s philosophy, in a nutshell, it promotes cleansing your life of all the things that don’t give you joy. In the spirit of spring cleaning, my friends and I recently had a Marie Kondo party to collectively motivate ourselves to clean out, tidy up, and share some joy.

Making a little extra space in your closet doesn't have to involve a lot of hand-wringing and soul-searching.

Wow, we’re nearly 75% of the way through the Cure (yay, you!). I’m guessing that it feels good to have a cleaner, more organized home and I know you want to is keep it that way with as little fuss as possible. Well, today’s assignment is a small thing that helps to set you up for long term success; a little time spent this evening will make the rest of your year easier. Sound good? Here’s how to do it….

It’s one thing to get rid of items that have a lot of sentimental value. It’s easier to ditch stuff that you don’t care about, have duplicates of, or just don’t really need. If you are starting a long-overdue purging process, start with this list. Trust me: you won’t miss a thing once they are gone. Coffee Mugs: Many people mindlessly collect mugs, much like business cards or matchbooks.

The Style Cure is all about making one room in your home more beautiful, organized and healthy. The outbox concept is a bit of a magic bullet – in one fell swoop, it will help with all three missions. Even though it’s a powerful tool, it will just take you a few minutes to get one in place, so let’s do it today… We’ll be prompting you to use the outbox throughout the Cure to help you get things decluttered and organized.

Organizing words of wisdom from a pro.

I read a remarkable statistic the other day: When Benjamin Franklin died, he had over 70,000 pages of documents in his home. Today, you and I can easily carry around that much data on our smartphones. Admittedly, our data probably isn’t anywhere near as brilliant, but the ease of storing this information means we accumulate far more digital clutter than we need. If you’ve got five minutes and would like to reduce the amount of digital clutter in your life, try these quick tricks: 1.