When we’d been in our house for 25 years, I embarked on a year of decluttering. I gave myself the full 12 months, knowing that some weeks I’d spend several hours and others more like five minutes, but I committed myself to making some forward progress each week.
Marking my progress with washi tape
My goal was to go through every closet, cabinet, drawer and storage area for a major edit — tossing out, giving away and ultimately organizing. When I finished any space, I marked it with a small piece of turquoise washi tape on the inside of the drawer or the closet door jamb or whatever. Over the year, those little turquoise markers accumulated throughout our house. For some reason, marking my decluttering progress like that was one of my favorite parts of the entire process.
I say one of my favorite parts, because I really did enjoy the entire process. It was incredibly satisfying to jettison so much bulk and to see the tidy, well-organized results.
Small steps of decluttering count
Many weeks, I would tackle nothing more than my makeup drawer, or the drawer where we drop our keys, wallets and assorted receipts we don’t know what else to do with. For the biggest jobs, I cleared a weekend and enlisted professional help.
My sister Amanda is a real estate agent who also owns a business helping people clear out their long-time houses to downsize to something smaller. Piles of junk mentally exhaust me, but she is undaunted by decades of clutter. We picked a weekend, and she came to Atlanta to help me with a couple of the major decluttering projects.
Basement decisions based on Hell Yes rule
Amanda managed to get me through the entire basement with dispatch. Things we use on at least an annual basis, like beach chairs and other gear for our summer trip to St. George Island, and party equipment like boxes of wineglasses and dinner plates for our New Year’s Day party, went on the shelves that are easy to access.
Stuff I don’t use but want to save, like a huge set of Brio trains and two big crates of wooden building blocks I’ve earmarked for my eventual grandchildren, went in big plastic bins in a hard-to-reach corner. She kept me on a tight timetable, forcing me to make instantaneous decisions on a huge number of iffy items — keep it, give it away, throw it out. (The Hell Yes rule was quite useful in these snap decisions.)
Decluttering sometimes means you first end up with lots of clutter. We created giant piles of stuff earmarked for various charitable organizations, and an embarrassing amount of junk in black trash bags for the garbage pickup guys.
Lesson learned: Keep one black suit
Then we moved on to the basement closet where I supposedly store out-of-season clothes, but really stash anything that doesn’t fit or I’m just tired of. Since it was towards the end of Covid, I hadn’t worn a lot of my more business-y clothes in a while. Or really, any pants besides jeans or leggings. We sent tons of designer suits, jackets, blouses, pants, dresses and skirts off to a consignment site, never to be heard from again. (I’m sure I have some credit online somewhere, but I’m not sure how to get to it.) Most of the rest, we put in the give-away pile.
I learned recently that we were maybe a little over-zealous in the closest declutter. When Steve and I had a funeral to go to, I went downstairs to find a black suit or a black dress, only to discover we’d gotten rid of every single option of that ilk. I finally found a black pencil skirt we’d fortunately overlooked in the back of the closet.
My other favorite part of decluttering is finding the right organizational container for every area of the house, from plastic bins to quilted china cases to drawer dividers. (See my favorite kitchen cabinet organizers in this post.)
As it turns out, I had those little turquoise washi tape strips throughout the house before the start of December. But of course, as soon as you clean out a drawer, it starts to collect clutter again. I’ve made a mental note not to wait 25 years before my next house-wide decluttering.
