Peace of Mind Organizing

Decluttering Step #5: Put everything away

17 February 2014

Here is the fifth and final entry in my Declutter Your Home blog series. Each Monday since January 20, I’ve covered a different step of the decluttering process: Step #1, Create your vision, Step #2: Choose your space, Step #3: Gather your supplies and Step #4: Ask key questions. This ends the series, but keep an eye out for future series!

If you’ve been reading this series and followed the steps, you’ve created your vision for your space, chosen a small but mighty place to start, gathered up your supplies and started making decisions about what to keep and what to let go of. This last step is critical, because it’s what’s going to stop you from finishing with a worse mess than when you started.

When you have a decluttering session, it’s important to reserve time at the end of the session for this clean-up step.

Here’s all you have to do: Put everything away.

• Put the keep stuff back into the space you decluttered.
• Throw away the trash
• Take out the recycling
• Put the donations in your car or call a charity for a pick up
• Take the stuff that belongs in other rooms back to those rooms
• Return any items that belong to other people
• Clean up your supplies

Even if you haven’t finished decluttering your space, put everything away. Then you can go about your business until your next decluttering session. Otherwise, you’ll be tripping over stuff. And worse yet, the items you segregated for disposal will somehow work their way back into the general population, so you’ll have to decide about them all over again. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen.

That’s it. If you follow these five steps in as many sessions as it takes to get through the areas you want to declutter, you’ll have a decluttered home. The next step will be organizing it. Keep an eye on the blog for a new series on organizing your decluttered space!

Tagged with: declutter, decluttering, declutter your home series

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