Over the years, I have written on and off about my cleaning/decluttering strategies, like in Room of the Week and Room of the month.
I haven’t been sticking to my schedule as well since we’ve downsized to a condo in walkable downtown Decatur. What I have done, however, is an “everything in a week” each summer – kind of like spring cleaning, but in the summer when it is too hot to go outside and do anything else.
At the moment, I’ve finished every room but the office and laundry room. The laundry room has become the catch-all for all the things that I need to get rid of, and is quite a disaster at the moment.
As I wrote in my criticism of the KonMari method, decluttering can’t be done once and be done. It must be done over and over again. No matter how careful I am to not let things into the house, our needs change over time. What I once used a lot or wanted to keep, I no longer have a need for. Thus, the process needs to be repeated. The conscious consideration of individual items. As our daily routines change, so does how we classify “like” things. Once a school book, now a reference book.
And so I try to tackle once a year. The problem with “all at once” is that I end up with large piles of things that I need to re-home. As I prefer to find new homes for things rather then just tossing them out, the removal from our home of these now unwanted things can take as long as the decluttering itself.
Living room, pre-decluttering (post-decluttering doesn’t look that much different, actually):
