Decluttering

This year, we’re on a mission to help you tackle spring cleaning on your time. Each weekday until April 13, we’ll guide you through a plan to clean and organize different areas of your home, but you’ll have the flexibility to choose exactly what to work on and how long you have to dedicate to the job. Sign up with your email so you don’t miss a spot!

We all know the benefits of making the bed every morning. Along with tidying up your bedroom in a pinch, this neat ritual helps set an orderly tone for the rest of your day. Clearing off your coffee table every day can be similar. As one Apartment Therapy reader put it: “Clearing off the coffee table is the making-the-bed of the living room!” Take a few minutes to clean up your coffee table each day, and you’ll enjoy a clearer mind and set the tone for a cleaner living room.

What’s the easiest target when decluttering fever hits you? The closet, of course. It’s probably overflowing with clothes you haven’t worn since college or things you’re not sure why you even bought in the first place. And sure, there are plenty of cliches out there about when to get rid of clothes.

It's smart — before you dig in on your spring clean — to minimize the stuff that needs to be cleaned and cleaned around.

“I have so much closet space I don’t even know what to do with it,” said nobody ever. I mean, even president Obama has a closet-space shortage, so for those of us wishing for just one more little nook to stuff our things in—we’re not alone.

We love personality frameworks because they offer us a way to understand ourselves and make us feel comfortable about traits that others around us might not understand. (Like: I need alone time to recharge because I’m an introvert.) But you can also take advantage of personality tests to let you thoughtfully hook into what makes you tick in order to create change in your life. Take Gretchen Rubin’s latest book, The Four Tendencies, for instance.

In my family, everything happens in the kitchen: work, bill paying, meal planning, arts and crafts, homework, evening gardening. Oh, right — and cooking and dining, too. Even though those are the main purposes of the space, so much other gear can creep into the kitchen it seems like sometimes there’s no space at the kitchen table to eat, or on the kitchen counter to prep food!

Cleaning and organizing strengths and pitfalls for each type, as well as suggestions for how to tackle homekeeping and embrace your unique personality,

Have you ever noticed that stepping into your cluttered, messy closet makes you stressed? Understatement of the day? Well, you’re not alone. It turns out that exposure to a greater density of “stuff” – like a jam-packed closet – can lead to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Assistant professor of psychology Darby Saxbe, Ph.D., worked on an intriguing study at UCLA where married, dual-income couples gave researchers a video tour of their home.

It’s Friday and you walk into your home, ready for a relaxing weekend after one hell of a workweek, and you see… ugh, clutter. You think to yourself, “Wasn’t this place clean just last weekend?” Apartment Therapy Weekend Projects is a guided program designed to help you get the happy, healthy home you’ve always wanted, one weekend at a time. Sign up now for email updates so you never miss a lesson. Or maybe it’s been longer.

The pleasure of a perpetually less-cluttered house is worth the possibility that I might need to buy something again, someday.

The season of winter cheer is over, Groundhog Day is past us (Phil saw his shadow, by the way) and we’re left to stare down a few more weeks of cold and darkness with holiday bills still to pay down. But don’t let winter get you down without a fight. Here are some ways to combat the winter doldrums right in your own home. Most of the difficulties brought on by a severe form of winter blues, called seasonal affective disorder (SAD), stem from a lack of light.

Clearing clutter out of our physical spaces, and therefore out of our lives, has the power to refresh the space in our heads. While this alone makes any time a good time to declutter, there’s something about this time of year that puts us all in the mood to cozy up, buckle down and start over.

Tight on space in the kitchen? Your storage problem might actually be a “stuff” problem. It’s all too easy to overfill your kitchen drawers and countertop crocks with pretty uni-tasking tools when you’re walking down the aisles of Barrel, Barn & Beyond with a gift card (or worse — a registry gun) burning a hole in your pocket.

Each of us has personal feelings about cleaning and home keeping. But what remains remarkably similar across the board is the trouble spots that we all find tricky to solve. Which, by extension, means that those perpetually organized people who never seem to have the stuff explosions most of us fall prey to have found successful ways to address these very same sticking points. Nothing multiplies like paper piles.

New Year’s perpetually brings on the urge to purge, and with Mercury now out of retrograde and a pack of planets in Queen-of-the-Capsule-Collection, Capricorn, it’s a luminous moment to catch some serious stardust with your Swiffer.

She's been cleaning out her attic on Instagram.

The beauty of decluttering is that the more you do it, the more you’re surrounded by only the things you need and love. Even if your goal isn’t a minimalist aesthetic, getting rid of excess will clear both your space and your mind and it’s quite likely you’ll come to love living with less. Here are the best questions, techniques and mind hacks from 2017 that help us do just that.

This time of year is one of influx and more, more, more. Layers of decorations, extra throw pillows and blankets, house guests, that second slice of pie — not to mention all the new items brought into the home as gifts. While everything is still contained in wrapping paper and ribbons, before the shiny new things enter the realm of official Household Stuff, take time to make some space by getting rid of these oldies you’ll never miss.

Decluttering—especially if you have a lot of stuff to begin with—can be an exhausting task. You can spend hours going through your things and realize you’re not even remotely close to being done with all your sorting. If you always feel totally spent when you’re done with a major decluttering session, the key might be in avoiding those giant, day (or weekend!) long clean-outs in the first place.

Update: We now know more about Marie Kondo’s upcoming TV show. The Hollywood Reporter announced Wednesday that the eight episode season will air globally on Netflix. The as yet untitled series “will focus on Kondo as she guides people who, as Netflix describes them, are at a crossroads to spark joy in their homes, transforming their lives in emotional and surprising ways.

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?

Ciao! Sayonara! Adios!

For the aesthetes among us, the journey of organizing doesn’t begin and end with an approved checklist of what to get rid of. It’s more than a mindful or tactile task; if you’re a lover of design, organizing a home is organically something visual. That notion is mostly ignored in the modern decluttering book canon — for example, there are zero photographs in “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” — and we’re not the only ones who noticed.

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.

As you probably already know from experience, decluttering, as freeing as it can feel when you’re all done, can be a challenging process. It’s hard to get rid of your things! What if you need it some day? What if it has some sentimental value but you never use it? How do you get rid of gifts from other people without feeling guilty?

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).

This is it—the final day of the September Sweep. Whether or not you’ve been on the whole journey with us, I bet you’ll get something out of today’s post. It’s all about taking all the old things we set aside all month and giving them a new home.

Here's how to handle them for good.

Decluttering is an exercise in introspection. You need to think about the way you feel about your things (aka the entire KonMari philosophy) and also about when and how you use them. Who wants to hang on to things they don’t need? It’s that question—will I really use this?—that is at the heart of my favorite closet decluttering exercise: The reverse hanger trick. The idea is that you turn all the hangers in your closet around so that they hang backwards on the rod.

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.

I don’t know about you, but my bathroom is usually the first casualty to clutter. I think it’s because it’s the last room I spend time in on my most hurried, out of control days. In a rush to get out the door, I leave my bathroom in a mess of tissues, makeup and hair products that, yeah, don’t get picked up as quickly as they should when I get home. So my bathroom has always been in a perpetually messy state that lends itself to attracting more clutter.

It’s the final week of our month-long decluttering plan (you can catch up here if you want to join in), and hopefully your home is feeling lighter, leaner and more in-control than ever. That’s why now is the perfect time to set up a system that I believe is the secret to keeping future clutter from getting out of hand.

New technology is forever changing the way we live with media at home, but I bet you’re still hanging onto some relics of the past. Instead of ignoring them—hidden away behind the doors of a TV console or the depths of a storage closet—today, we’ll try and cut down on those collections. If you have a cherished collection—say, a perfectly curated assemblage of vinyl records or books—today’s mission will go quickly.

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.

It’s hump day! In spite of the hum-drum of the mid-week, let’s do something a little unexpected and pivot a bit on our usual decluttering. Most of the time—and it’s true for those of you who’ve been on this September Sweep journey since the start—decluttering is a cure. You see a problem—the mess—and attack it with some medicine—a whirlwind weekend decluttering—to make the trouble go away.

I sit writing this from my dining room table, looking over at a pile of… stuff… sitting in the middle of my floor.

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.

Set a timer and make sure you know where to look and what to look for.

I could write an essay (I kind of already have) about how good it feels to have a clean refrigerator. Your stocks of foodstuffs are something you touch every day, and when the fridge, freezer and pantry are neat and organized, it carries on like a snowball effect through your whole space: If you have a tidy fridge, you must be a tidy person. Suddenly you’re empowered to muscle through a small mess on the dining table before you sit down for dinner.

Many rooms at home are sanctuary spaces for relaxing and unwinding. Some are utilitarian spaces. And others… others are for hustling. Your hard-working hustle zones (think: the home office) see a lot of action—and collect a lot of clutter. Today, we tackle that. If you don’t have a home office area, you can attack any area in just the same way. Maybe today is a good day to dig in on a workbench in the garage, or a place where you sit down to do crafts and DIY projects?

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.

We are really in this now! Week one of the September Sweep saw us setting up a few systems and rules, and now we’re halfway through week two and really making some progress with our home’s less orderly areas. Next up: the kitchen. I don’t think my kitchen cabinets have ever been as clean and tidy as they were on the day I moved in to my loft.

Your bedroom should be — nay… it needs to be — a peaceful place. Who can lay their head down for a good night’s rest while they’re surrounded by a mess? Bedroom clutter is a unique beast, too. It’s usually stuff that came in from other rooms and hasn’t been put away just yet, which should make today’s timed task a simple one. Remove as much clutter as you can from the bedroom in 20 minutes.

It’s Monday! We’re into week two of our decluttering program and the assignment I have for you today is a doozie—attacking a problem area that I know everyone can relate to. I have good news and even better news: The good news is we’re in this together. And the even better news is that you might have already gotten a jump start on this task from Friday’s mission to declutter the entryway. Yep… we’re talking about paper clutter.

There are plenty of books and articles out there that can tell you exactly how to clean and organize your home, but do you want to understand your clutter better? After all, understanding your habits is one of the keys to getting better at managing them and becoming more organized.

The hardest part about decluttering has to be the “getting started.” Without a real nudge to dive in and actually do it, you might never feel the urge to, say, tidy up a few over-stuffed baskets or cluttered drawers. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. The thing is, today’s “room sweep” micro-mission is a timed exercise. All you have to do is focus your energy on one area—today, the entryway—and deal with it for just 20 minutes.

We all have a monster in the closet (or garage, or attic, or basement, or storage unit, or… you get the picture). A clutter monster—one big old pile of goodness knows what, to be honest. It always starts innocently enough—some equipment for a sport you’re going to get back into, or a collection of craft supplies for that hobby you’re sure to pick up again.

The very hardest part of clearing things out of your home isn’t the actual brawn of walking them out the door. Nope, there’s another muscle that needs exercising to prepare for this fight: Your brain. The tough part of decluttering is truly the mental aspect of deciding what should stay, and ultimately, how to get over the hurdle of liberating those once-worthy objects from our ownership. You have to be merciless.

The thought of getting your home under control can feel like a bit of an ordeal sometimes (especially if you’re like me and suffer from an ailment I like to call Object Liberation Issues™). When the job is too big, it can feel like it’s overwhelming and hard to get started.

Since the first time I saw Clueless, I have envied Cher Horowitz’s closet. Not even her clothes—although she’s still one of my style icons, so I’ll take those too!—but the computerized system that she used to pick out her outfits. I mean, it was truly amazing, both because it was pretty high-tech for the 90s (It was 1995! Her computer had a touch screen!) and because it meant that she always looked flawless and her closet could so easily stay impeccably organized.

In need of some major decluttering (or perhaps an entire home organization makeover)? Whether you live in a tiny studio apartment or a huge house, paring down and finding a space for everything can be an overwhelming task, especially if you’re a person who forms attachments to your things.

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.

Most people who love to read have strong feelings about bookshelves: they daydream about floor-to-ceiling libraries, they don’t care that they are overstuffed, and they’d never dream of culling their collections. But let’s be honest, not every book we’ve ever read will be revisited, lent out, or talked — or even thought — about after an initial read.

It’s not just the inside of the fridge that serves a function in our kitchens. For many of us, the fridge is a central spot for displaying kids’ art, the soccer calendar, friends’ engagement photos, and the magnets we collect. This weekend, let’s neaten up the outside of the fridge so we can enjoy afresh what we choose to showcase. If you are a fridge minimalist and never hang things on the fridge, pat yourself on the back and skip straight to step three and four.

We’ve written a lot about downsizing over the years, sharing tips from experts and house tours, but sometimes the best ideas actually come from you, our readers. From how you let go of your things to the unexpected pros and cons of moving to a smaller space, you’ve shared it all with us. So, for those of you moving or looking to go the minimalist route, here’s a roundup of our readers’ best advice on downsizing, straight from the comments.

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.