Decluttering

No matter how many cabinets you have, or whether your countertop is better measured in inches or acres, I guarantee that if you've been living in your space for a while, your kitchen storage is full.

Gather all your paper piles up from the dining table, entryway, desk, and kitchen counter, and sort it into these five categories.

Your entryway isn't likely the first spot you think needs decluttering. But whatever space welcomes you home probably works really hard to keep your life running smoothly.

Sure, maybe a whirlwind weekend spent in a twister of trash bags will get your space sorted faster than spending a month decluttering slowly. But the real winner here is the person who uncovered a new lifestyle that allows them to be perpetually uncluttered.

The space needed function and organization, but now this well-organized linen closet is too pretty to be hidden behind closed doors.

It's time to be ruthless. And your decluttering truth serum is these five questions.

Here's how to chip away at whole-home organization while also still living your life.

“Tidying is the act of confronting yourself.” —Marie Kondo.

From Monica Gellar-worthy organizational skills to Charlie Kelly-level messiness, glance at this grid to see where your distinct cleaning style falls.

These 10 guidelines can apply to any area you want to tackle, and will make every cleaning endeavor go just a little bit more smoothly.

To clear my head—and my space—for a season of carefree entertaining, here are five things I'm throwing away (or giving away) this summer.

Here are some common culprits that make a clean bathroom appear disheveled.

I thought I was an all-star organizer, but my first week working with a luxury organizing company showed me that there is always room for improvement.

Reverse to-do lists begin at the end of the day. Here are three rules to keep in mind as you're writing one.

Embrace the in-between-ness of spring, put the winter behind you, and make room for the coming season.

Banish these things from your counters and not only will you have the room you need to do your thing, but you'll also end up reducing visual clutter.

Where do you begin when it comes to cleaning out your home in preparation for finding stuff to sell at a garage sale? Well it turns out it’s pretty similar to regularly decluttering your home; only after you’ve combed through drawers and closets, you’ll be evaluating if there’s anything you can make a little dough on. 1. Declutter You’re going to start looking for things to sell in a garage sale in the same way you would if you were aiming to declutter your house.

It takes a lot of effort to appear effortless. Disney parks don't become the "most magical places on earth" without an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes problem-solving.

Maybe you see beautiful, clutter-free spaces in magazines or on the web, and think: my home could never look like that. But it can! Freeing your space — and your life — from overwhelmingly huge amounts of stuff doesn’t take superhuman effort. All you need is a little commitment to some basic principles. This isn’t a new idea, but I think it’s a wonderful place to start if you’re aiming for a simpler, less cluttered life.

Once the joy of giving and receiving has died down, we often find ourselves with, shall we say…more things than we had last month. While you may not be ready to do an all-out purge, it’s the perfect time for a mini-purge through implementing a one-in-one-or-more-out plan.

I have a pair of beloved sweatpants that has a hole in them. I would still continue wear them — in spite of said hole — IF I could find them, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my partner boxed them up and toted them off to Goodwill. She is curiously mum on the subject, feigning perfect innocence in the face of my pointed questioning and unblinking stares, but it’s been months since I saw them last. I am quickly losing all hope of ever seeing, let alone wearing, them again.

A friend you haven’t seen in a while calls to let you know she’s in the area and would love to stop by. You say: “Of course—come over!” You think: “Just give me three hours to clean up, please!” Ideally, we’d follow the “tidy up a little every day” routine, but despite our best efforts, there are certain spots in our homes where the chaos just tends to build.

I don’t know what it is about this time of year, but you’ll often find me with a garbage bag in one hand and a spray bottle in another. I’m tossing things left and right and deep cleaning what’s left. I guess you could call it “spring cleaning,” but with the weather being always-sunny here in Los Angeles, I feel it’s less about the season and more about how things tend to pile up during the school year: the toys, the papers, the… stuff.

If you aren’t already hip to the value of a good cleaning book, now’s the time to listen up. Along with offering useful housekeeping tips, these books often provide eye-opening philosophical insight about organizing your life. Case in point: Mary Kondo’s bestselling book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.

In the post-Marie Kondo era, clutter has become the enemy. Excessive documents, old T-shirts, and unread books are some of the offending items we see everyday that definitely don’t spark joy. While I’m the first to agree that Kondo’s folding techniques and organizational tricks are genius, there are other ways (besides purging all your worldly belongings) to get your home—and your life—feeling orderly once again.

In an increasingly overwhelming world, minimalism is having a moment. It seems very appealing (and doable!) to take control of your life one possession at a time. You can purge what you don’t need, get educated and intentional about what you do need, and forget the rest. If you constantly feel like you’re too busy, too tired, or too broke, minimalism says that a life with less stuff promises more.

Does it feel like junk mail is taking over your life? Between random credit card offers and ads piling up in your mailbox and a seemingly uncontrollable amount of subscriptions and spam flooding your inbox, things can get cluttered and super overwhelming—and fast. The good news is, there are some tricks and services you can use to manage both your mailbox and your inbox to keep your life as junk-mail-free as possible.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re on a mission to do something good for our homes each weekend. Sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and tackle a dreadful, somewhat thankless task that simply must get done. Other weekends, we do something that feeds the soul for the week ahead. This weekend, rather than a deep-dive in one particular area, we’re going to blitz around our homes and attack a handful of 5-minute tasks. Turns out you can get a lot done in five (or 10, or 15) minutes.

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.

As much as we love our homes, sometimes even rooms that are “done” can feel a little tired. Or maybe we’re feeling in a bit of a slump and could use the pick-me-up that an updated space could provide. As much as we wish we could plunk down the cash for that couch that’s been on our wish list or finally switch out the wall-to-wall carpet for hardwoods, there are room fixes that aren’t just budget friendly, but entirely free.

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.

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.

There is endless advice in the world about how best to declutter your home—some of it is helpful, a bit of it is masterful, and much of it is inconsistent. “Keep only the things that spark joy” they tell you… but, I mean, you need to keep your screwdriver and vacuum, no matter how boring or frustrating their utility may be. Point is, the “rules” don’t always work.

The kitchen is the biggest workhorse room in almost every household. It’s not only the place where we store our food and prepare our meals, but especially in the age of the open concept home, it’s also a hangout spot and maybe even a homework or work area. With so many things going on in the kitchen, and so many people in and out of it constantly, it’s easy for our kitchens to become cluttered, and fast.

Decluttering a space is a gargantuan task, no matter how small the space itself might seem. That’s because the real challenge isn’t how much stuff you have, or how messily it might be lumped around. The really tough part of decluttering is when you pick up a single object in your hand, knowing you have no good reason to keep it, but finding it impossible to let the thing go.

There’s a hard way and an easy way to deal with a big mess of clutter. The hard way is trying to commit to tackling it all at once, mentally planning for a weekend project you know will never come, as you once again sit and dawdle and tell yourself it’ll be easier when the weather’s better, or when things aren’t as crazy in your life. The easy way is to chip away at the mess, little by little until it’s in a good place.

Kitchen clutter is like a gas: It’ll expand to fit the space allowed. If you have a small kitchen, you probably feel like there’s never enough space for your stuff. Well guess what? Big kitchen people have that same problem, too. No matter how many cabinets you have, or whether your countertop is better measured in inches or acres, your kitchen can probably use a little slimdown. So that’s what we’re going to do today. Do a 20-minute decluttering sweep of your kitchen.

Emotional attachment to an inanimate object is one hell of a drug. It makes sentimental clutter especially difficult to say goodbye to. And for me, a writer who makes a living helping people with their homekeeping, it’s a very difficult thing to help you with. So I’m not going to tell you to get rid of anything at all. At least not yet. First, let’s open up the closets, drag out the boxes, and let’s find your sentimental stuff. What counts as sentimental stuff?

Keeping your home clean around the clock isn’t the work of wizardly magic. It’s just an exercise in focus. You have to commit to give every single thing at home a place where it belongs, even if that place is kind of a zoo. That’s why, if you want to keep your home clutter-free, you don’t need a junk drawer… you need several. Let’s face it, not every object you own is easily categorized.

One of the biggest reasons writing is so powerful is that it removes the swirling thoughts from our heads and puts them into a space where they’re far from lost. From the insights and resolutions that come from journaling to the highly practical peace of mind that comes from jotting down that new appointment on our calendars so we don’t have to not forget it, once pen is put to paper, something magical happens.

There’s clutter that’s obviously clutter: junk mail in stacks on the counter, toys with missing or broken parts, duplicate kitchen tools that never get used. And then there are the things that seem important or that aren’t as easy to get rid of as, say, tossing in the recycling bin or loading in the car for a drop off at the donation center. These things sit in our homes and take up valuable space in our drawers and in our minds when we encounter them.

A child’s relationship to books is one of the biggest predictors of their success down the road, and exposure to all types of print has a lot to do with early reading ability. So hang on to your well-worn “Calvin & Hobbes”treasuries, go ahead and subscribe to Highlights, and definitely send a book-loving message by keeping a fairly robust library, if that’s your thing.

If there’s one thing we can all hope for from the Marie Kondo “Tidying Up” craze, it’s finally saying goodbye to the concept of retail therapy—a notion coined by the Chicago Tribune in the late 1980s with the idea that we had started “measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills.” In her show and book, Kondo has us thank and then get rid of the clutter that is no longer serving us.

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.

Channel the energy behind the change in seasons to feel more in sync with your home.

There are so many kinds of clutter: excess items you think you might need someday, clutter you’re so used to having around that you don’t even notice it anymore, piles of paper you have to go through, and things you feel guilty getting rid of because someone gave them to you or you spent good money on them. But there’s one kind of clutter you should never feel bad hanging on to.

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. As Apartment Therapy’s cleaning editor, my number one job is to help our readers take care of their spaces. It has been so fun connecting with all of you during our group projects (like the January Cure) and on Instagram (I’m always here for questions!).

Just like finding the right eating method or exercise regimen, finding the right decluttering motto can be the key to keeping your home clutter-free. Many find an admonition by William Morris helpful when deciding what to keep and get rid of: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” But this popular decluttering criterion could actually become a pitfall if you’re not careful.

The January Cure is all about refreshing and organizing your home for 2019. We tackle one assignment each weekday throughout the entire month. It’s not too late to sign up, and you can visit the Cure page to catch up with the assignments so far. Sometimes all you need to declutter is a fresh perspective. Once your things are yours, letting go of them can feel like a loss. A loss of money or preparedness or potential. And those are very real feelings.

Your personality can help you focus your efforts on a certain thing or category of items, so you can dig in and really start to make an impact in your space.

I wish that we could all hit pause on our daily responsibilities, welcome the prim and utterly delightful Marie Kondo into the most intimate recesses of our homes, and KonMari all the clutter out of our lives. But Kondo’s method of “tidying up,” popularized (and demonized) once again by her show on Netflix, might not always be accessible to everyone—no matter how inspired they are to speak to their belongings and make mountains of their clothing.

Nothing is worse than coming home to a messy apartment after a long day, but finding the time to clean in the morning can be equally daunting. That’s why we put together a list of micro decluttering tasks that can easily be incorporated into your morning routine. Read ahead for seven super small ways to organize your space in the AM, so you can start the day off productively (and come home to a tidier place when it’s over). If you’re anything like me (i.e.

The January Cure is all about refreshing and organizing your home for 2019. We tackle one assignment each weekday throughout the entire month. It’s not too late to sign up, and you can visit the Cure page to catch up with the assignments so far. You already know your paper problem areas. Maybe it’s the kitchen counter, dining room table, entryway console, or the front of the fridge—or maybe it’s all of the above.