10 Decluttering Secrets For An Organized Home (Shhh!)

Not everyone has the luxury of hiring a professional organizer. Luckily you don’t need to hire a pro to get your home organized!

In fact, sometimes people waste hundreds of dollars on pro organizers, only to find they can’t maintain the expensive system they were given (more on that later).

These decluttering tips will help you get your home super organized.

Even if you find just one tip on this list that you can implement in your home, you’ll be one step closer to having a clutter-free space for good.

Let me know in the comments below your thoughts on this post.  Have any organizing tips of your own?  I’d love to hear them!

Best Decluttering Tips For An Organized Home

1. Stop bringing more stuff into your house.

Keeping your home organized and clean will always be an uphill battle if you keep bringing more items into your home.

If your home stays the same size, yet you keep buying more and more things, how will your home ever be organized?  At some point, you are going to run out of space.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to think you won’t ever buy more stuff. Things break, clothes go out of style or maybe you just want to treat yourself.

That’s really okay and nothing to feel bad about.

One thing that really helped me to not buy as much stuff is having a thought process every time I am about to purchase something.

Ask yourself these things before buying something:

• Do I really need this?
• Will I use this in a year or will it just collect dust?
• Do I have something in my home already that serves the same purpose as this item?
• Is this something I can borrow from someone?

Another trick you can use is simply time.

Sleep on it before you make the purchase.

Give yourself 24-48 hours before making a purchase. This will drastically cut down on impulse buying, which equals less crap that will clutter up your home.

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2. Organizing is a skill that can be learned.

Not everyone is a natural organizer.  If everyone was, there wouldn’t be so many people with unorganized homes.

Pro organizers want you to believe you need them in order to be organized.  The truth is you can learn this skill too!

I am not a natural organizer. I had to train myself to be this way.  In fact, I actually took a course on organizing.

Yes, I’m with you I didn’t even know organizing courses existed lol.

But, this organizing course took my home from an unmanageable mess to a space that I actually feel relaxed in because it is so organized.

Best of all I learned how to declutter my entire home step by step and keep everything that way instead of spending money on a professional organizer

If you are overwhelmed by all your clutter and are tired of having a dirty home, then I know this amazing organizing course will really help you out (it did for me)!

Read: In-Depth Guide To Home Cleaning 

3. Keep a bag to donate and a small garbage can in your closet.

One reason why going through your closet is a time-consuming task is because you don’t do it often enough.  You might go a year or years without cleaning out your closet.

Donate items and throw away damaged items as you go throughout the year instead of once a year. Have a bag or box in your closet for donations.

Maybe you try a top on that no longer fits or you just don’t love it anymore. Instead of putting it back in your closet, right then and there add it to the donation box.

That way going through your closet doesn’t have to be such a big ordeal every year.

You may be wondering what the garbage can is for.  It’s for two things.

1. Toss your items that are beyond repair and can’t be donated into the trash can.
2. When you get new clothes, place the tags you cut off them in the garbage.  You shouldn’t need to empty your closet garbage can that often because not much will be going in it.  If you have a clothing item that fell apart in the wash or was defective, you can just check the garbage can for the tag to be able to return it.

4. You don’t have to overhaul your entire house. Start small and build on that.

You may have heard the saying, how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time. Now I don’t eat elephants and I hope you don’t either lol 😂😂😂, but the saying is true for organizing.

If you try to organize everything all at once, you probably will fail or at the very least feel overwhelmed and quit.

Just start small and take one tiny bite out of clutter a day.

One great way to do this is by taking my fun 30 day organizing challenge.  You will have one area of your home to focus on organizing each day.

If organizing every day doesn’t work for you, just take as long as you want to complete the challenge.

You can find the details of my organizing challenge and get your free printable here.

5. Organizing doesn’t have to be expensive.

People pay hundreds (even thousands) of dollars to organize their homes.  If you want to spend that much, more power to you.  But don’t ever feel like you have to spend that much to have a decluttered house.

Here are some helpful inexpensive ways to organize your home:

• Utilize containers and boxes you already have.  You may have items in your house already that would work just fine to organize your belongings.  Maybe they aren’t pretty, but as long as they get the job done that’s all that matters.
• Hit up the Dollar Store.  The Dollar Store has so many containers and jars that work just fine to organize household essentials.
• Make your own organizers.  There are so many DIY organizing ideas on Pinterest that’ll save you money.
• Check Amazon for cheap organizers.  There are plenty of inexpensive organization products on Amazon. Here are some cheap organizing ideas from Amazon on a budget.
• Splurge in areas that are constantly riddled with clutter.  If you are going to spend money on organizing products, spend it on the worst areas of your home.

6. Getting organized isn’t the hard part, it’s actually staying organized that’s the challenge.

You can spend hours organizing but if you don’t have a system in place to maintain everything, you’ll continue to have clutter around your house.

Most people get so caught up in the act of organizing they forget the most important part.

Maintenance.

Let’s say you just lost a bunch of weight. If you get to your goal weight and have no maintenance plan, you’re just going to gain the weight back.

The same is true for organizing.

I wrote a whole post about staying organized.  You can read it in detail here, but basically I’ll sum it up for you.

Here are some easy ways to stay organized:

• Carve out a little bit of time every day or once a week to declutter. You can even set a timer, even if it is just for five minutes.
• Make your organizing time fun.  Play some music, dance around or whatever you want.  Anything you can do to make it not feel like a chore is great.
• Ask for help.  If you’re not the only one living in the house, you most likely are not the only one creating clutter and messes.  If you set up a kick-ass organizing system, try to get others in your house on board.
• Knock it off with the piles.  I am so guilty of this guys.  Instead of sorting the mail right then and there, I just make a pile. Then piles breed more piles! Take the extra twenty seconds it takes to put something back in its designated spot and stop making clutter filled piles around your home.

7. When you leave a room grab an item to put back.

This organizing tip is so easy and will really help you stay organized. Whenever you leave a room, if you see something that needs to be put away, grab it right then and there and put it away.

Imagine every time you left a room, you grabbed something laying around and put it back in its designated place.

Your home would stay so organized! Not only that you can have others living in your household do the same thing.

Think of how little of time this action takes but how much it will contribute to keeping your home clutter-free.

Challenge yourself for a  whole week to do this and see how it works out. You will realize your home will stay much more organized and clean doing this.

8.  Your first step in organizing any space is clearing everything out.

Yes, really.  It may look like a big mess but it will make organizing so much easier.

Now you have a blank canvas to set up your organizing system.  Not only that, you can really see all the items you have and get a clearer picture of what you need to keep or get rid of.

Maybe before you pulled everything out of your closet you never realized you had three of the same sweater.

This organizing tip is my secret gem when it comes to decluttering.

9.  The Konmari folding method created by famous pro organizer Marie Kondo isn’t just hype.

It’s not only a more efficient way to fold, but a space saver as well.

You’ve probably heard of the KonMari Method from the bestselling organizing book, “The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up.”

(I’m not going to go into the entire method in this post, if you want to know more I’d recommend reading the book.)

The one thing you might want to start implementing is Marie Kondo’s clever folding method.  Instead of the traditional way of folding, you fold the clothes so they stand up.  Think of it like you are filing your clothes in a filing cabinet.

It looks like a more complex way to fold but once you get the hang of it it’s actually pretty easy.

When I was learning the Kon Mari folding method, I found the video below from Abby Lawson from Just A Girl and Her Blog really helpful.  She adapts the method a little bit but I actually prefer her way over the exact KonMari folding method.

If you need to save space ASAP, I recommend watching the video, practicing on a few clothing items and start folding everything this way.

You’ll be amazed at how much space you save!

10.  Organization doesn’t have to be pretty. Being pretty is just a bonus.

Go on Pinterest or Instagram and you’ll see tons of organizing gurus and pros that have their homes in perfect order.  Everything is organized so perfectly.  It’s almost like organizing is an art to them and it has to be beautiful.

I would even go so far as to say that sometimes their organized home looks gorgeous, but is not functional at all.  Some people combine both well, but for many, it’s all about aesthetics.

Now I’m not trying to be a hater here.  It’s great if you want everything both pretty and organized.

Heck, there are times I wish my home looked that perfect.

But just know, beauty when it comes to organizing is just a bonus. First and foremost it needs to actually serve the purpose of organizing your items.

Another thing is so many times people feel bad that their home doesn’t look that beautiful or they don’t have the money to spend hundreds of dollars on pretty organizers.

If this sounds like you, just know that you are holding yourself to an unattainable standard that may (or may not) exist.

Most likely these people’s homes don’t look that organized all the time. Especially the ones who have kids lol.

They are taking the picture after they’ve organized everything and trying to present themselves in the best light possible. They don’t invite you into their Instagram world when they’re home is a disgusting mess.

Because why would they?

If you randomly showed up and took a picture of their closet, it probably wouldn’t be that perfect. Yet you are sitting there looking at your cluttered closet wondering what’s wrong with you that you can’t seem to ever get that organized.

Now for some people on social media, they might really be that organized. But for many, they probably aren’t.

You’re comparing yourself to something that doesn’t exist in the real world.  I encourage you to stop holding yourself to someone else’s standard of what an organized space should look like. You are just going to drive yourself nuts.

You have to do what works for you and your lifestyle.

So your organized closet may not be the prettiest. But the fact that it’s clutter-free is all that matters.

Hope you enjoyed these

decluttering tips & tricks!!