The Best Ways To Approach Household Decluttering

By Carolyn | July 14, 2020

Minimizing clutter at home is one of the best ways to reduce household stress and anxiety. The accumulation of stuff – toys, magazines, clothing, shoes, frames, decorations – is a serious problem for many families, and many don’t know where to begin.

The easiest solution is to hire a household concierge service like us to manage the project from end-to-end, but even then, it requires clients to participate. 

If you want to take matters into your own hands, below are some resources and recommendations. 

Books and Programming

Search for home organization books and binders at your local bookstore or on Amazon. Many of these books offer step-by-step guides on how to organize your household. 

Also, there are plenty of apps available to help you keep track of household items and tackle your to-do list. We also suggest browsing Pinterest to find inspiration on how to approach household decluttering projects. There are a lot of little tricks that can make a big difference.

Lastly, if you haven’t watched “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo” on Netflix, it’s a must-watch show for simplifying your life at home.

Materials

If you talk to the folks at the Container Store, they can offer plenty of wisdom and solutions to declutter your home. This is a problem they’ve been helping people solve for decades.

While expensive, California Closets is another company that can provide custom organizational solutions. This is a step-by-step guide to their process.

Lastly, consider finding a storage unit to place excess items that you don’t want to give away or sell, but you don’t have room for them in your home.

Services

Find out when your city’s bulk pickup day is and put it on your calendar. Better yet, place a sign on your refrigerator so you don’t forget. Also, ever get direct mail from banks who have free shredding days? Add those to your calendar, too.

Beyond that, services like 1-800-GOT-JUNK can be helpful to offload major items that you want to toss. 

For day-to-day chores and cleaning items, parents can enlist the help of their children. No, seriously. Garmin’s vívofit® jr. app allows parents or guardians to add chores that kids can check off on an app in order to gain points that they can use on various interactive games. Parents can also set their own prizes for chores. 

Resellers and Marketplaces

Many people make a full-time living from reselling items on Craigslist, eBay or Facebook Marketplace. There are also apps like Poshmark and Mercari that you can use to list and sell clothing and other items.

If you prefer to avoid the hassle of listing items, drive to Buffalo Exchange to see if they’ll buy your clothes or give you store value in return. Goodwill is a fantastic option for clothing that you want to donate. Many Goodwill boxes are located in grocery store parking lots to make it easier to drop off items.

If all this sounds like more work than you have time for, contact us and we can help you navigate the decluttering process.