The Question To Ask Yourself Before You Start To Declutter Any Room

Everyone has a tough time decluttering their home. You might start with the best intentions and be determined to change how cramped and overrun your closets feel. You vow you'll finish the day with stacks of donation boxes ready to be delivered to the nearest thrift store the next morning. But once the pruning process begins, things start to slow down. You begin to wonder if you'll regret throwing out that traveler mug with the cracked lid, or what if that argyle vest comes back into fashion? Before you know it, you have barely decluttered anything at the end of the day. If this sounds all too familiar, you might be jumping into the process incorrectly. 

Instead, start your decluttering session by asking yourself a simple question about each item: Is it beautiful or a necessity? If it's neither, you know it's time to put it into a box and donate it. The reasoning behind this inquisition is similar to Marie Kondo's KonMari organizing method, which asks the "does it spark joy?" question. If it's a necessity, then you obviously need to keep it. If it's both necessary and beautiful, that's the best of both worlds. But if it's not a necessity, do you find it beautiful or special? If you don't, it blends into the background and doesn't really do anything to make the design feel memorable. Instead, it's just clutter that the eye passes over and doesn't register. So, if you're truly ready to make your space feel less chaotic, this is a great way to prune all of the excess. 

The hardest part of decluttering isn't just removing stuff from your space but permanently clearing it from your house. If you can't quite convince yourself to get it out of the door, you'll be much less inclined to go through the pruning process. To reduce that friction, allow yourself permission to store those items that are neither a necessity nor beautiful in your basement, garage, attic, or spare bedroom and see if you miss them. Store them in plastic containers you can easily stack and keep tidy, and see if your mind ever wanders to that decor item or if you have the urge to bring it out. Give yourself a deadline you're comfortable with — whether it's a month or a full year — and if you haven't thought of those pieces once, you'll know you can donate them without regret. This trick, sometimes called the maybe box decluttering hack, will hopefully push you to part ways with those more lackluster items. 

However, what if you walk around your house and think almost everything is beautiful? If your donation pile isn't all that big, you might feel like your home is cluttered even though you like almost everything in it. In that case, only keep between two to five things on any given surface and then put the rest into storage. You can rotate those items out every season. Not only will this trick keep your decor fresh and exciting, but it will also feel more orderly without having to make the difficult decision to throw things away.