Spring Cleaning Tips

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on a mission to declutter my house. I’m a bit of a pack rat, so this hasn’t been spectacularly easy for me. But I’ve been making good progress. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’ve discovered how liberating it can be to unburden yourself from unnecessary worldly possessions. Besides, it’s spring, and there’s no better time to undertake such a massive task. Here are six tips that have made it easier for me.

1. Come up with a plan of attack. Every week, I choose a single messy or cluttered spot (a corner of a certain room, a closet, or drawer) and resolve to sort all the way through it. But once I finish with it, I’m done for the week – I get a sense of accomplishment but not a feeling of being overwhelmed. For you, this might mean choosing a specific room and cleaning it up over the course of several days. Or maybe it means choosing a specific kind of object (say, clothes, books, or old files) and sorting through all of them in one day. However you do it, attacking clutter without a plan or distinct goal will only create frustration.
2. You need four distinct piles: Keep, Donate, Recycle, and Trash. Your “Keep” pile should, in most cases, be your smallest pile. Books, clothes, DVDs, and usable but unwanted items should find their way to the “Donate” pile. Plastics and all manner of paper will end up in the “Recycle” pile. Your “Trash” pile should be second-smallest, populated by only the things you can’t donate, recycle, or otherwise repurpose.
3. There is a very excellent book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (by Marie Kondo). For me, one of the most helpful parts of this book is the section concerning “selection criterion.” The reader is advised to actually touch each item she’s sorting through and then evaluate her feelings: if the object brings happiness, save it. If not, get rid of it. This is a simple measure to help you decide what to do with things that hold (or once held) emotional significance.
4. Cleaning experts tend to advise against sorting stuff away to be looked at later (basically procrastinating!). But this can be helpful. Sometimes I’ll put an item in another place I plan to sort through later. This gives me a little more time to think about whether I actually want to throw said item away. And when I see it a second time, I almost always want to toss it.
5. You also may have a lot of stuff in cardboard boxes. I strongly suggest you empty your boxes into plastic storage bins. Flatten the boxes and put them in a tight space for an impending move, but don’t use them as everyday storage – clear bins look so much tidier, and create an illusion of declutter. You’ll find them much less stressful.
6. Utilize space that already exists. It seems every professional set of tips involves telling you to install new shelves or buy some magic sorting bin. Here’s an example: I have a walk-in pantry. All I kept in there were air conditioning filters, extra cans of paint, and a lot of old boxes (most of them totally unnecessary, many for stuff I no longer even owned). Once I recycled all the boxes, I found that I actually had a lot of space left over – space I’d pretty much written off. I moved a bunch of the tools and miscellaneous stuff into the closet, thus finding a place for things I knew I couldn’t throw away, clearing clutter out of a place it didn’t belong, and utilizing space I’d previously overlooked. It was magical!