Organizing and cleaning an insanely disorganized house

[Anonymous]

I’m looking for any tips, resources, or suggestions for how to tackle the overwhelming task of getting my house in shape. Until now, I guess it just wasn’t a priority to keep things clean and organized, but in the meantime the mess and dirt have been accumulating. I’ve got extra time on my hands the next few months and I’m trying to customize a roadmap for all of the big and little tasks that will help clear the clutter and mess. I’m looking around and it feels overwhelming. Advice or suggestions???

[Anonymous]

Take small steps first until you've gotten into a groove.

Start with one room with a large trash bag. Put anything that doesn't serve a purpose and not good enough to donate in the bag. Repeat the process all over the house.

Next create a donation box, or two, or three...

Once you got rid of the excess stuff, figure an organizational system that works for your family, one that makes sense for your life and is easy to keep up.

You can do this!

[Anonymous]

Declutter aggressively first.
Otherwise you’ll just be putting ball the junk into neat piles.

[Anonymous]

The original Flylady book is actually good for a project like this.

[Anonymous]

The first thing I'd do is a phase one declutter. Set a goal of getting two bags out every day (either trash or to donate). If you're gathering stuff to donate, make sure it doesn't sit. Go to Goodwill weekly to drop it off - remember, the goal isn't piles, the goals is to get stuff out of your house.

Once you've gotten rid of the low hanging fruit, I'd do either a category or a room at a time. So - your clothes. Kid's clothes. Bathrooms. Kitchen. Toys. This is important: Do not start with the hard stuff (long term storage, etc) start with the easy stuff that you touch all the time. Be quick to ditch stuff.

Saving stuff for emotional reasons is normal and fine (old photos, the T-shirt from your beloved childhood camp, the art your kid made) BUT you need to designated a place for it. I like to have a big drawer or a shelf for "memorabilia" like that. Unless it's something decorative that you're displaying, anything you're keeping for emotional reasons should go on that one shelf. That helps keep it limited and stops it from taking over your life. Your t-shirt drawer should just have t-shirts you'll actually wear.

When a space or category is cleaned up, make sure you're establishing routines around it. That's more important than moving forward to the next space or category - I like to have a touchpoint in the day or week when stuff is all put back. So the kitchen is all cleaned before we go to bed. Toys are all put away after dinner. Living room and bedrooms are tidied on Saturday morning so we have a nice space for the weekend. Etc.

[Anonymous]

Consider a service like Organizing Maniacs. Totally worth the cost, they’re great.

[Anonymous]

I have been doing this since about April 2022 and I'm still going. At this point we've done the majority of the house with the big step of basement and garage left so it might still take me another year to be totally done!

I work with a professional organizer but I have been doing some things myself too. I agree that the first task is going through everything into keep, donate, trash.

Do one room at a time, little by little if you can and don't get discouraged. Atomic habits is about getting a little bit better every day. And once you declutter one room you have to maintain it too.

My problem was everything didn't have a home. So I am really try to get rid of trash and give everything a home so we know where to put it away next time.

[Anonymous]

First, throw out a lot of stuff. You don’t need it. Then find a place for everything else. Then clean.

[Anonymous]

The Marie Kondo book is good. It will guide you through the whole house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Marie Kondo book is good. It will guide you through the whole house.

I have to say I found the Marie Kondo book disappointing. It was very short on specifics, just a lot of generalities and pep talks about how much better you'll feel when your life is free of clutter.

I also didn't like that she seemed to have only one solution for everything, the landfill.

[Anonymous]

Loving the suggestions! When it comes to donating old clothes, I have to admit this paralyzes some of my efforts because I don’t have a go-to place, so it just gets shoved somewhere for “later” which then becomes never. I’m in Arlington if anyone has some suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes when a task like this feels overwhelming, just getting ANY kind of start at all is helpful. Don’t get all caught up in letting perfect be the enemy of good (or however the saying goes).

So maybe grab a trash bag, set a timer for 10 minutes, and go through a room gathering as much as you can in that time that needs to be disposed of. You could do this across a few rooms or all of your rooms. You could do one room and do a few rounds. You could add in 10 minutes of items to donate, depending on the types of clutter you have.

However you do it, odds are this will give you at least some sense of progress and accomplishment, and momentum can build from there. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Loving the suggestions! When it comes to donating old clothes, I have to admit this paralyzes some of my efforts because I don’t have a go-to place, so it just gets shoved somewhere for “later” which then becomes never. I’m in Arlington if anyone has some suggestions.

In Arlington use Green Drop. You can select a donation pickup every 1-2wks that includes clothes. You leave bags and boxes out front and they come to your house to pickup. Or check out Casa Mariflor on FB, I think they take clothing too. Or, you can always take it to the Goodwill at 50 and Glebe.

Don't overthink this or it will paralyze you into inaction.

[Anonymous]

The key to decluttering is psychological, it amounts to coming to two realizations:
1. Clutter is anything that doesn't have a place.
2. If you want a decluttered house, the amount of stuff you can have in your house is limited by the places you have to put it.

It means changing your mindset from "do I need this?" to "does this object rate the amount of storage space it requires, given that the space I have is limited?"

It helps to be aware of some of the underlying psychology, such as the sunk cost fallacy -- that what you paid for something in the past matters now -- or the endowment effect, which causes you value something you possess simply because it's yours. When you assess the value of something, you shouldn't think about what you paid for it, you should think, "If I were walking down the street and this was on the curb with a sign that said 'Free,' would I pick it up?"

Sorting through a lot of stuff requires making a lot of decisions, and decision fatigue is real. One way to stay focused is to limit the scope of decisions. Go through a room or even a closet and make a simple binary decision: Does this object belong in this room? If not, put it outside and deal with it later.

Later, you can go through the pile and sort it three ways: keep, give away, throw away.

If in this process you find that an object moves from room to room without ever finding a home that's a sign that it needs to leave the house.

[Anonymous]

If you can create a budget for furniture or storage items to help organize. One problem we had was that there was no where for some items to go. When we invested in a few strategic furniture items we suddenly felt like things were so much more organized.