How to Clean Out a Cluttered Room

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By imseth85
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Article Rating: (3 Ratings)

Cleaning a cluttered room is a daunting task, but these steps will ease the process and keep your room clean. A clean room will lessen your stress, however you must understand that parting with useless items is an essential part of the process.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Large garbage bag
A nearby room with space
A desire to organize your life
Willingness to part with useless items

Step 1

Take a large garbage bag and fill it with any and all obvious garbage. If you have to decide whether or not something is "garbage", it probably is.
Step 2

Evaluate all remaining items in the room. Ask yourself, "would I notice if someone threw this away?". Parting with objects is difficult for some, however eliminating thing you do not need is the most important part of keeping a clean room. If everything you pick up has sentimental value, you will never have a clean room. Learn to let go of things, and you will find that the very next day you cannot even recall what you threw out.
Step 3

Take as many things out of the room as you can. Place them temporarily in a nearby room so that you have space to work. During this process, keep a garbage bag close at hand so you can continue discarding paper, trash, and useless items.
Step 4

Use a broom, shop vac, or conventional vacuum to completely remove all dirt and dust from the room. This is a good opportunity to clean out desk drawers. If you can bear to do so, empty the entire drawer into the garbage without even checking what is in it. Useful or important items are NEVER kept buried in a drawer. If you examine all items in the drawer, they will remain in that very same drawer for an eternity.
Step 5

You should now have a relatively empty room, save for large items and furniture. You can bring all of your things back into the room, and place them down in an organized manner. Now you must change your habits drastically, as the next step describes.
Step 6

Keep a filing box for any and all papers you may accumulate. Not only will this prevent papers from piling up around your house, it will help you recover documents when you need them.
Step 7

Choose a place to keep each of your things and be consistent. If you find yourself loading up a drawer with useless things, you should consider putting them directly in the garbage instead. This can include (but is not limited to) Christmas cards, your old cellphone that you lost the battery to, old instruction manuals, and things that you keep meaning to sell on eBay (but never get the chance).

Comments

travelingtoe said

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on 12/15/2009 What I find really useful is to bring out that shredder (or buy one if you don't have one) and plug it into the main wall socket of whichever room you are currently working on. I find paper junk is the thing that clutters my home the most . . . old bills that have been paid, mail that you don't need but has your address on it, etc . . . these things can be hard to throw because you worry about "identifying" information that could potentially be stolen/used. Eliminate the worry by shredding everything except the absoutely most important (bills yet to have been paid, birth certificates, tax returns, etc). Worst comes to worst you'll just end up shredding too much and have to replace certain documents but at least you know that no one else can find them, steal them, use them!