September Decluttering Challenge: Week 1

Who’s ready to tackle some clutter together?! Decluttering is one of my favorite things to do for my home; I’m always amazed by how much lighter I feel once all the excess is removed. If you’re feeling stressed out by your house, decluttering is 100% where you need to start. No amount of deep cleaning, daily routines, or organization are going to make a difference until you get rid of the extra stuff. 

Here’s how this is going to work: We are going to spend four weeks fully decluttering one room a week. Note that this is different from decluttering specific items from your home. There’s nothing wrong with following a declutter checklist that has you go through your home and tackle specific things like clothes, books, paper, etc. But I want you to experience the power of a fully decluttered room, because I guarantee it’s going to make you excited for more. Each week’s room is broken into five days worth of tasks. You don’t have to spread them out over five days if that doesn’t work for you. If you work outside the house during the week you might do better tackling them all on your days off. This isn’t meant to be a rigid guide but rather a springboard to help you see real progress in your home. I'll try to send each week's challenge on Monday so you have the week to do it whenever it works best! Let’s dive in!

Week 1: Master Bedroom

If I had to pick an area to start with decluttering, I will always recommend either the master bedroom or, if you have kids, toys. These were the first two things I decluttered in my own journey, and they are two of the most impactful changes you can make in your home. The master bedroom is also a universal space; whereas you may not have a playroom or craft room, I’m assuming you have a room you sleep in? That’s the room we are tackling this week. Get ready for a week of peaceful sleep as you enjoy a simplified bedroom!

Day 1: Five-Minute Tidy

• Today’s task is simple: set a timer for five minutes and see how much you can get done. I want you to focus on two types of items: trash and things that already have a designated home in your house. Today, we aren’t analyzing how many clothes we should own or whether or not to get rid of those Amazon purchases that have been sitting in their boxes for months. Instead we are going to give our brains a quick win by making easy, visible progress. Trash is going to include everything from actual trash that didn’t make it to a trash can to broken hangers to empty Amazon packages. You’re also handling easy tasks, like putting away piles of clean laundry, returning jewelry to the jewelry box, hanging up clothes that fell off hangers, and returning the book you finished the other day to the bookshelf. I know these tasks are really just “tidying” and may not feel like actual decluttering, but I promise that if you neglect to do them you will both make the decluttering process harder, AND you won’t feel like you actually completed it once you’re done. If your room is super messy and you want to go for another five minutes after the first round, feel free to; but also don’t underestimate how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time.

Day 2: The Purpose of the Bedroom

• Do another five-minute tidy before jumping into the rest of today’s work.

• Let’s pause our decluttering for a moment and consider what sort of things you actually DO in the bedroom. Obviously you sleep and probably get dressed in here. But what else? I read in our bedroom once my kids are asleep at night, and I also will frequently do my Bible reading in here, so I want things in here to support these types of activities. Consider what things are detracting from the overall purpose of your space. If you want your bedroom to be a restful place, both physically and mentally, then you need to eliminate the things that don’t feel restful. If you work from home, can you do it in a different room? If your bedroom has become a “holding place” for things that need to be dealt with, I would recommend going through these things and asking yourself why they’re in here. Sure, sometimes things just need a place to sit for a few days, like for an upcoming birthday party. But other things get placed in our bedroom because we tell ourselves we will deal with them in a few days, then we forget and they become part of the room and we don’t even notice them anymore. I did this with one of our Christmas storage totes this year. It was too heavy for me to move to the proper storage closet (because it was full of our huge collection of Christmas picture books), so I left it where I had packed it in our bedroom until I could remember to ask Trevor to move it for me. And it was still there in August when we started packing for our move. Today your job is to get these types of things out of your bedroom. Your bedroom shouldn’t be storage for things that don’t have a home elsewhere. If you really can’t figure out a place for it elsewhere in your home, then you may need to consider if it’s actually worth keeping. Most of us don’t have space in our homes or the mental bandwidth to manage things that aren’t serving any purpose in our lives.

Day 3: Promote what matters

• Yesterday you identified what the purpose of your bedroom is. You also removed the things that were detracting from it. Today, I want you to focus on what SHOULD be in your bedroom. I’m guessing that no matter what you want for your bedroom, you want it to be restful, so what do you need in order to actually rest? Obviously, your bed. But I also like to have a book or two, a journal and pen, and everything I need for my personal Bible study time. These things are all restful for me. I enjoy putting together a cute outfit occasionally for church or date night, so I need my clothes and jewelry to be organized. Maybe you have other things you need in order to prepare for a good night’s sleep. Or maybe you have another purpose your bedroom needs to serve, like when you have a baby who still sleeps in a bassinet in your room. Think through the things that should be in your room, and make sure they have a designated place. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Do you always forget to put your jewelry up in your jewelry box? Maybe you need a small bowl for rings and a cute jewelry tree to hang your necklaces on. Sometimes the reason we don’t actually put things away is because it's not easy enough. This doesn’t mean you’re lazy; it just means you are juggling a million things. I like to think of this as self-care at its simplest: I feel better when my home is tidy, so making it simpler to keep it tidy is ultimately taking care of myself.

Day 4: Tackle the closet

• If you have a master bedroom closet (whether tiny or a walk-in), we are going to tackle it separately here. You should have already dealt with things like clothes yesterday, so today I want you to tackle any storage that is housed in your closet. Remove each storage container and actually go through it. Carefully consider why you’re storing the things inside: do you have definite plans to use them in the future? Are they memories that you want to keep safe? If they don’t fit in one of those two categories, they probably need to go. Try not to have general storage containers; I like to designate storage for specific things. For example: all my Christmas decor gets housed in specific containers together. I use a shelf in my closet to house all of our family’s scrapbooks. I also have a tote in my master bedroom closet with off-season clothes that belong to my husband and I. One other type of storage container I think all homes should have: memory bins, one per person. You can make these as big or as small as you want (depending on how sentimental you are), but having one spot to corral all the special things keeps our memories manageable. If you have loose things being stored in your closet, consider adding containers to keep it more organized. Please don’t spend lots of money on this right now!! I’m betting you can find SOMETHING in your home that will work, even if it’s just an empty Amazon box. If you absolutely have to buy something right now, there are cheap options at Dollar Tree. You can always upgrade to something more aesthetic later, but you really won’t know what specific container you want until you live with it for a while.

Day 5: Limit the overflow

• Dana K. White, in her book Decluttering At the Speed of Life, talks about something called the container concept. She shares that she had a realization one day that containers, by the very nature of their name, are meant to contain. This means when we have baskets overflowing with magazines, closets with clothes spilling out of them, and shelves with stacks of books teetering on the edge of falling, we have too much. Your home can only have so much if it's going to function well. So today I want you to revisit the things you worked on this week, the things that deserve a place in your bedroom because they are serving its purpose, and pare them down so they fit their container. You can do this one of two ways: simply remove the excess that you don’t really like/use until it fits comfortably, or remove everything and give yourself a blank slate. Let’s say you are overwhelmed by your closet; it has way more clothes than you can possibly wear, and you can’t find anything because there’s simply too much there. You also may have no idea what to get rid of. Do this: take everything out, then start refilling it, putting your favorites in first. Stop once the closet is full (or nearly full). Don’t keep trying to cram more in. You want your clothes to fit comfortably, not be so crammed that you can’t see what you have. Make sure you’re putting your actual favorites in first, not the ones you feel like you SHOULD keep. What are the pieces you pull out over and over again to wear? Those are your favorites. Hint: if it still has tags on it (unless you bought it two days ago), it needs to go. Repeat this process with any other things that are going to call your bedroom home.

Phew, that was a lot of information! If you hit an overwhelming moment in this process, just hit pause. you can always pick back up with the decluttering tomorrow. Remember to focus on better, not perfect, and you will see progress, slowly but surely. Happy decluttering!