In partnership withThe Libman Company

Try the “One-Room Reset” to Declutter and Make Over Any Space, for Free

published Sep 12, 2020
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Credit: Nathan Rigaud

Apartment Therapy’s Decluttering Cure is a free 20-day decluttering program, guaranteed to leave you with a lighter, leaner home. You can sign up here to get all 20 lessons delivered to your inbox.

Have you ever been driving somewhere, gotten a little lost, and turned down the radio so you could think better? Yeah, I don’t know the science behind it either, but eliminating noisy distractions sure does a lot to clear your head. You can harness that same energy when it comes to your home.

Decluttering Tip: If you’re overwhelmed by the visual clutter in a room, clear the room down to just the essentials and layer only what you need and love back in.

→ Create Your Own Decluttering Workbook

The one-room reset is a simple exercise that helps you not only reduce visual clutter, but also make over your space to keep things fresh and interesting.

Here’s how it goes…

Credit: Nathan Rigaud

Day 5: Do a “one-room reset” in an area of your home.

Choose one room or area of your home to reset. You might choose a room where you spend a lot of time, or one zone—maybe a bookshelf—that stands out as a problem area in your home.

Walk around the room and clear off decorations and other objects from your surfaces and place them aside, into a box or even just in the corner of another room. Clear out anything that’s decorative—artwork, tchotchkes, pillows—and strip this space down to just the essentials. The goal is to leave yourself a totally blank slate. (This is a great opportunity to deep clean this space, too!)

The large head on Libman’s Tornado Mop made quick work of Taryn’s deep clean—even though parts of that room hadn’t seen a mop in months—while the Libman MicroFiber Duster captured surface dirt and dust like a champ. Once the room was clean and fresh, she was able to see what she really wanted it to look like—clean and clutter-free!

That’s all you have to do today: clean the space out. Because I want you to live with the room as-is for a while—a day, a week, or more—to gain clarity about what you need in this space.

Credit: Nathan Rigaud

Whenever you’re ready, you can add things back in—one thing at a time, or all at once. If you want to bring everything back to exactly where it was, go for it. But more likely, you’re going to learn some lessons about what sorts of things are valuable to you, and how much visual decoration is “too much.” These are insights you can carry with you through the rest of this Cure, and really any home decluttering project to make smarter decisions about what should stay and what should go.

After a while, anything you don’t want to layer back into the space can be put to use in another room, or placed into your sell, donate, and maybes boxes from day one.

More Ways to Participate in the Decluttering Cure:

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