5 Simple Decluttering Tips to get Started Simplifying your Home

Today I am sharing 5 simple decluttering tips that I find extremely helpful.

It can be hard to start decluttering your home or even one area of your home! These 5 simple tips helped me get started and also help me to continue to declutter as time goes on.

Find a Donation Location

If you can find one or two different places to donate your items this will speed up your decluttering process.

After spending hours going through a section of your house and putting everything in bags and boxes the number one way to slow yourself down is to see all that stuff sitting there for weeks!

One thing I do as soon as I am done decluttering an area is put everything in the back of my car so it is ready to go.

If I only have a few items and it isn’t worth my trip, I store them in a closet until I have enough. I have found 2 donation centers that are really close to my house.

Once the “stuff” is in my car there is no turning back! It’s going!

The quicker the donation items leave the house the more inspired I get to continue on my journey.

Tell Friends and Family

By telling friends and family (or maybe just one person) it can hold you accountable. This helped me to find other friends and family members who were already on this journey.

By telling people and sharing my story, I have inspired others (my mom) to question what they have and want to keep.

If you can find a friend who is also on this journey it will help you to stay inspired.

Kinda like a workout buddy, it’s a declutter buddy! Of course, I share a lot of my decluttering journey on my YouTube channel and this has helped me connect with a lot of nice people that are also on this journey.

5 Simple Decluttering Tips Video

Declutter Furniture

When decluttering most people think of trinkets and dodads. When I first started I thought of books and extra items in my kitchen.

After a few months of decluttering, I started to question if we needed all the furniture we had in our house.

We had 2 rocking chairs, we had 3 living room side tables.

Once I started to declutter furniture we were not using I was surprised at how large and open our house started to look.

A friend came over and said, “wow your house looks so open.” I was excited that people could actually see the difference.

One perk of having less furniture is there are fewer places to hide things and less cleaning of the furniture. It is also a lot easier to clean the floors!

Deal With Paper Now

Paper clutter seems to enter the house fastest. Every day we get tons of junk mail and there is usually a school flyer every other day.

The easiest way to deal with paper clutter is right away.

As soon as I bring the mail in I sort it into 2 piles. Pile one, I deal with right away. If it’s something to pay, I pay it, if it’s something to mark on the calendar, I do it.

Pile 2 is junk and I recycle it. Some people have a pile for LATER.

I don’t like a later pile. The later pile will grow and grow. One way to cut down on mail is to have everything sent by email, which I do, but some things still come in the mail.

Visualize the Decluttered Room

I believe in visualization! The quickest way to make something happen is to visualize it.

When I am changing a room in my house or decluttering an area I visualize what I want the final product to look like.

I think visualization can work for almost anything in life, but it has really worked for my house.

When I first started decluttering I visualized my blanket cupboard. I wanted everything to fit in the cupboard nicely, at the time everything was crammed so tight the door could barely shut.

By visualizing how I wanted it to end up it was easy for me to know exactly how much I would need to get rid of to make this happen.

At this point, everything fits perfectly in the cupboard and we have never needed anything we donated.

Read and watch my video on Becoming Minimal for a Year