What is the Best Way to Declutter a Home on a Budget?

Do you long to live a minimalist lifestyle, having only what you need use and love in your home?

Your home can be a place that you love being in and that you look forward to inviting people to visit. But what if you are reluctant to have folks over due to all of the STUFF? I am asked all of the time, “What is the best way to declutter?”

The short answer is that there are many ways to declutter and organize a home (hold onto your hat!) and guess what? You can implement one strategy for some parts of your home and use another approach for others. You are in charge!

And the best news is, none of these strategies require expensive organizing supplies! You can implement each and every one of these choices with mindfulness and with varying investments of your time, money, and energy. Depending on what you end up decluttering, you may even be able to make a few bucks by selling some good quality items. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Don’t fall into the trap of procrastinating because you don’t yet have the perfect tool, plan or strategy. Are you a closet perfectionist like me?

The good news is that you don’t have to follow Marie Kondo’s structured, one-size-fits-all plan, get rid of everything you own and become a monk, or even hire a professional to declutter!

Wondering whether it would save you time and stress to hire a professional organizer? Check out Why Work With a Professional Organizer? to guide your decision.

And there is a way to declutter your home or office without succumbing to stress and overwhelm – mindful decluttering! In over 16 years of supporting hundreds of clients in mindfully decluttering their spaces, one thing is crystal clear! Each and every person’s situation requires a slightly different approach.

Though I have certainly noticed common themes among folks who choose to mindfully create a clutter-free life, each person or households situation is unique and their needs vary widely.

Your decluttering and organizing choices will vary based on your budget, your relationships, your stage in life, your personality, and your passions, and beliefs, just to name a few factors.

There is no end of possible methods for how to declutter your house, but here are a seven popular ways that have worked for many of our clients and followers.

The most obvious strategy for decluttering and organizing a household is to declutter one room at a time. This approach has the advantage of keeping your efforts contained to a relatively small space. It can also be easier to create specific goals and a clear vision for a particular room. It has the potential disadvantage of failing to consider whether there are objects in other parts of the home that functionally or logically belong in this room. This can result in the challenge of not allowing space for such items to eventually make their way into this room. For tips on how to organize specific rooms, read more on organizing a bedroom or check out our post on organizing a kitchen.

In this big-picture method, you work by category instead of by room, and the process may require more dedicated time, space, and planning. Say you’re starting by assessing and decluttering your clothes. You would first hunt down all of your clothes from different closets, drawers, and boxes and gathering them all to declutter!

Despite this challenge, some people work best when they can see all of the items they own in a certain category, whether it’s clothes, shoes, books, papers, dishes, or otherwise. Does this approach make sense to you? One client of mine was adamant that this was the only way she could address the books in their household. We gathered the books from all three levels of the home into the basement and spread them out on the floor. We then sorted them into categories that made sense to her.

The advantage of taking this whole house approach was that she could easily see any duplication of books and also take the opportunity to pick the ones that were the most meaningful to her from each collection. After we identified the treasures, we were able to accurately assess which categories of books would best fit onto which bookshelves and the organizing part was easy.

An extreme method of decluttering by category is the popular KonMari method. In this method , you declutter by doing one big purge. This method is trendy due to Marie Kondo’s bestselling books and her popular Netflix series. Ms. Kondo recommends that you hold each and every object in your hand and ask yourself “does this spark joy?” It is a simple and charming way to simplify the process of decluttering. You are then encouraged to thank each item to be discarded for its service before sending it on its way. For me personally, not many pieces of paper spark joy so I find that different decluttering approaches work well for different types of objects.

I have a colleague who spent an entire day with her partner going through every article of clothing that they owned and she found the process to be very liberating (if not a wee touch tiring!)

The downside: This method can be quite time consuming and many experience decision fatigue.

And remember, you might choose to use the Konmari method for your shoes and purses and use a different method to edit your papers or your kitchen items. Experiment and feel free to mix and match methods!

We find that most of our clients and the folks in my Declutter Your Life membership work best by breaking their decluttering projects into small, manageable steps, as in the slow-drip method outlined by by Stephanie Bennett Vogt in her book Your Spacious Self. If you can carve out the time and afford the support to do one big purge, give it a try and be sure to let us know how it goes!

The “slow-drip” method is what works best as a long-term strategy for most of our clients. Though working with a professional organizer can offer a jump-start to get the decluttering energy moving, we can also assist you in breaking daunting projects into manageable action steps with estimated timeframes.

Then you are empowered to do a little at a time, using mindful awareness to determine when it’s time to take a break, eat a snack, or work through difficult feelings.

In our post on How to Declutter if You’re Not Marie Kondo, we go into more detail about how to apply the slow-drip method.

Now I know that when you first hear the phrase “death cleaning” you may not be inspired to go right out and do it. But stay with me for a bit!

This approach became popular in the United States through Margareta Magnusson’s book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. This approach is gentle, simple, and very practical! One idea that I like is creating a box of things that you wish to keep while you are living, but that your heirs do not need to go through and make decisions about.

Get our take on this subject and method in our popular post The Life-Changing Magic of Death Cleaning.

The changing of the seasons are perfect times to refresh your home and your life. You might feel a burst of energy to wash the car, repaint your office, or tackle a decluttering project. That’s why “spring” cleaning is so popular!

For spring home cleaning and maintenance tips, check out the Complete Spring Home Maintenance Checklist from our friends at Redfin. I was one of the featured experts!

Other popular times to tackle decluttering or organizing projects are at the start of the January New Year, the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, or the Chinese New Year.

Whatever time of year you choose to begin (and truly there is no right or wrong time!) make sure to give decluttering the space it deserves in your schedule. Setting aside a weekend each season to declutter the home is a smart way to make sure you make progress toward your goal of creating a decluttered home.

If you’re not sure where to start, why not start with your treasures (aka the high-joy items in your home)?

The chart below illustrates how even five minutes per day really does ad up!

“Spring Cleaning? Start With Your Treasures!” — Mindful Decluttering & Organizing

Each of these methods has its merits. Try one and then try another, or create your own combination of approaches.

In fact, one of my virtual organizing clients finds that if she looks intently at a particular area she wishes to tackle before going to sleep and then “sleeps on it,” she has more clarity about the most logical action steps when she returns to the project the next day!

By adding mindfulness to any of these approaches, you will make your decluttering experience more enjoyable, thoughtful, meaningful and longer-lasting.

If you are a budget conscious, do it yourself-er who has made some progress in decluttering on your own and you just need some support and accountability to keep the decluttering energy moving, my affordable membership program is just what you need!

If you would like to be able to move forward more quickly with gentle caring and expert guidance, the membership will astonish you with all of the goodies it offers at a budget friendly price point. 🙂