Figuring out how to purge your house? These strategies can help you to successfully purge unnecessary items from your home without being overwhelmed.
Purging and decluttering can be a huge task but it is also 100% doable without having a panic attack.
The trick is to have a plan before you start.
If you jump right into decluttering and purging without first having a plan of attack, it will likely proceed similarly to my own experience:
You start out strong, full of energy, grit, and probably 4 cups of coffee, yeah! Anything lying around gets “the glare” and immediately gathered into the small pile collected between your folded arms.
The path of purging is aimless, but it’s moving fast. After about 1 hour of “whirlwinding” through your house, you feel achy and exhausted.
Then the couch calls to you, then the pillows beckon, and finally you pull out your phone and it’s game over. As you doom scroll through YouTube and Tik Tok, you realize that purging your house was much more work than you were prepared for.
Don’t let this be you, have a plan!
This post covers 5 strategies that will help you figure out how to purge your house successfully.
Contents
How To Purge Your House
1. Get Help
This first strategy to consider is simply not doing it alone. Even enlisting 1 other person cuts down the amount of work you do by half and adding more helping hands will lessen your load further.
It might sound like a no-brainer but people can get really stubborn about things “they think” they can do themselves.
Maybe you can do it alone, but it would be much faster, easier, and enjoyable with other people.
The more helpers you can get, the more rooms you can declutter simultaneously. You also have the opportunity to delegate and control your operation, if you are that kind of person.
If not, however, you may find it beneficial to request other’s opinions on the process as well as their contribution to it. Having other people to bounce ideas off of can help relieve the stress of coordinating the cleanup effort.
Lastly, when you get others to help you out, you can turn what would have been a chore into more of a party, provided you enjoy their company in the first place.
TIP: Don’t just ask for help, invite it! Offer people a meal, snacks, or a movie night afterward; make helping you as enticing as possible.
Who knows, inviting others to your “purge party” may create fond memories in your house as much as it creates tidy rooms.
2. House Purge Checklist
Once you have your crew, it is time to take inventory! You can also do this before everyone shows up, but again, many hands make light work.
Using checklists is a great way to keep track of your progress as you go. It can also help to identify what areas of the process need to be done and by whom.
The idea is to organize your thoughts and put your goals on a pad (or iPad, if you’re a techie) of paper, making a list of some kind is good place to start.
This list can be anything from items you want to keep to rooms you want to be cleared, it depends on your needs.
You may find that several kinds of checklists help organize what to purge, how, and from where. As a means of inspiration, here is a sample checklist to keep track of every space that might store purgeable items:
Room Checklist
You can save, download, and print this checklist to give to your purge mates but remember to keep a master copy so that things stay organized.
When everyone is on the same page (literally), the purging effort will run smoother and with fewer issues. The faster the process gets completed, the happier everyone will be.
3. Where To Start Decluttering
“Where do I start?” is always the million-dollar question, isn’t it?
For this process, it makes sense to start decluttering the largest room in the house, which is usually the living room.
I suggest starting here for 2 reasons:
- It is not normally a place to store a lot of items. It may have some but won’t have as many as other rooms, making it a quick win for you right off the bat.
- Once it is done, it can serve as your “workroom” for the rest of the process since it gives you the largest possible area to organize things.
After you have your “workroom”, you can start going through your checklist(s). If you have a crew, you can use the checklist(s) to delegate rooms.
If some rooms are large and open enough to be used as a “workroom”, you can split up the load between them.
TIP: If you have a checklist like the one mentioned above, everyone can go through the storage spots on the list, gather the items in each, and make a pile in a workroom.
This should clear out all storage spaces and expose every item that has taken up residence within your own.
From there, it is time to play Judge.
You evaluate every item in the pile by this one question: “Does this bring me joy?” (thanks Marie Kondo)
If it does, you separate it into a new pile and proceed to the next item. Once you are done “judging”, you should be left with a keep pile and a purge pile.
The keep pile can either go back into the spot where it came from or you can try your hand at finding them a new home. The other pile, however, is destined for eviction by sale, gift, or garbage.
4. Decluttering Clothes
Of all the items in your possession, clothes are likely the most used, handled, and left around. They can also be the item you accumulate the most of and would therefore take more time and space to sift through.
That being the case, if you do have a lot of clothes, you should vet those separately from the rest of the items to save space.
You may even consider doing them on a different day if there is a substantial amount to go though.
Purging your closets and drawers can be the most difficult part of purging your house. Clothes provide a sense of comfort, security, emotion, and even sentiment and can make them more difficult to judge than other household items.
TIP: When deciding to keep a piece of clothing or not, try asking yourself if the loss you would feel from pitching it would be because of FOMO (fear of missing out), incentivization (you got a great deal on it), or sentimental value.
If the answer is either of the first two, I would highly recommend purging the item if it subsequently fails your “joy test”.
On the other hand, sentiment can be a form of joy, so I would not recommend purging a sentimental item even if you don’t really love it.
5. Decluttering Your Life
Indeed, decluttering and purging your house is usually not a small job. It can take days, if not weeks, to go through your possessions and decide if they should continue to be.
The rewards of that effort, however, are truly special and can change how your entire home feels. It is a wonderful feeling knowing that your home and everything in it has been specifically chosen by you to be a part of your life.
It feels as if all of the dirty things in your house (sometimes literally) have been washed away, leaving you with a refreshing clean feeling like you’ve just gotten out of a nice warm shower.
Ironically enough, much like taking a shower, the “clean” feeling only lasts so long as the bustle of life sets back in with re-accumulation accompanying.
That is why it is important to purge your house of junk like you purge your skin of grime; frequently.
Purging your house once a year is not frequent enough to make you and your house feel at peace. Achieving that constant state of “clean” will take a commitment to frequent scanning and vetting more often than not.
Yes, this will take time to do but if you use the strategies laid out in this post it will get easier and quicker to purge your house as you make it a part of your life.
TIP: Arm yourself with knowledge and explore other great resources on how to purge your house.
This article By Sofia Lee is not necessarily about purging but it is full of great tips that will help you while you do.
The ideas in this post covered 5 strategies that will help you form a plan to purge your house successfully.
0 Comments