How I did it: First, we tidied our bedroom. We moved everything from the spare room into the bedroom. This gave us both a sense of achievement at having made a tangible start, and motivation to get on with it, so that we could comfortably use the bedroom again.

We sorted things into three piles: keeping, throwing-away, and Freecycling/taking to the charity shop. We put the throwing-away stuff straight into bin bags and took it all downstairs to where we keep stuff ready for the rubbish collectors.

Then we wrote a list of everything on our Freecycling/taking to charity shops pile, and made a post on Freecycle listing everything. Within four days, the entire list had been collected. One person's trash is another person's treasure, as they say!

Finally, we found places for all our 'keeping' stuff to live. There wasn't much of it - if it's been sitting unused in your spare room for months, chances are you don't need it!

Once all that was done, we bought a desk and chair, and put up some shelving. I moved all my crafting stuff up there which of course decluttered much of the rest of the house - two good things in one!

Lessons & tips:

• Be ruthless. If you haven't looked at it in months, chances are you don't need it. If something is neither useful nor has sentimental value, get rid of it. This is not the time for "But it could be useful some day!"
• It helps if you have a final purpose for the room you're decluttering. In our case, knowing we had furniture on its way to transform our spare room into a craft room, really motivated us to get it done.
• Don't stress out about it. Do like FlyLady and do it in fifteen-minute bursts. It keeps you focussed and stops you getting complacent.

Resources:

• Black bin bags for rubbish and Freecycle stuff.
• Cardboard boxes for keeping stuff.
• A willingness to work hard!

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Apr 30, 2009, 06:30AM PDT | 1 comment