If you are constantly annoyed by the sheer amount of stuff in your house, you need a 30-day decluttering blitz.
I'm an experienced and certified professional organizer, and my simple and effective one-month plan, detailed below one day at a time, will help you blast through the clutter in your home and kick-start a gear-change in how successfully you're able to streamline.
It's a decluttering tip you can repeat as many times as you want, whether it's a rolling challenge you work into your daily life around the year, or something you come back to every quarter for a top-to-bottom declutter of your home.
Why a 30-day decluttering blitz works
As with any habit in life, we can fall into a rut. Whether you're time or energy-poor, trying decluttering methods may fall to the wayside in place of more urgent tasks and home maintenance.
However, clearing visual clutter in living rooms, bedrooms, the kitchen, and other vital areas of your home will reduce your mental load, as well as making more space. This, in turn, will mean any storage ideas you implement will serve you and your household so much better.
It'll also save you money in the long-term and items will no longer 'get lost' in the melee, as everything will have a home, which you will know very clearly the location of as you're hands-on with donating or selling unwanted, or unused items, and keeping things streamlined.
What you'll need
- Storage baskets to corral or separate categories of items you're keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or getting rid of permanently. Homes & Gardens recommends a set of four beautiful seagrass baskets with handles from Wayfair that you can use during the 30-day decluttering blitz, but also for semi-permanent and pretty storage around the home.
- Strong trash bags, such as Walmart's Great Value Sustainable Strong Flex, pack of 40 30-gallon bags.
- Cleaning tools: Sanitize the surfaces and bins you clear out as you go. The Joseph Joseph cleaning system, available on Amazon banishes the need for many tools and is versatile, compact, and light.
- Multi-purpose cleaner: Homes & Gardens likes Method's plant-powered all-purpose Lime and Sea Salt spray, available at Walmart for non-porous surfaces.
How to do my 30-day decluttering blitz
If you need to declutter with health challenges in mind, pace yourself and take breaks. It's fine to tackle smaller areas instead, or extend the time frame from 30-day decluttering, to 90-days or more.
Otherwise, aim to complete in one month.
Start in the family room
Start in the family room and tackle these daily categories, for example, on day one, remove old magazines and newspapers:
- Remove old magazines and newspapers.
- Declutter your books and bookshelves.
- Edit down throw blankets and donate any you don't need or use to pet shelters.
- Declutter children's toys and donate to charity shops, hospitals or nurseries.
Next, move into the kitchen
By now, you will have reduced a lot of visual noise and cleared out space in your main living space. Next, move to declutter your kitchen and dining areas:
- Remove chipped glassware
- Remove chipped plates and cups
- Get rid of extra kitchen tools such as spatulas and ladles, and remove any that you have more than two of or never use. This is a good time to get rid of any black plastic cooking utensils, as they usually contain harmful microplastics.
- Reduce your collection of pots and pans and certainly remove any that have seen better days, or which have chipped non-stick coating, as this material is toxic if ingested. Keep only your best non-toxic cookware.
- Edit down your collection of serving trays. Are there any you were given that you don’t like? Let someone else benefit from them. Personifying your items is a simple but effective brain hack to help you shift items you've clung on to for a long time. Simply imagine them wanting to fulfill their purpose, and let them go to a new owner to do just that.
- Streamline your collection of table linens. Remove any tablecloths, napkins, and placemats that you don’t like, don’t use, or that are too old and stained and cannot be salvaged.
- Streamline and organize kitchen appliances. These are things you thought would be a time saver, but that you don’t use, and are now they are just taking up space, such as a toastie maker or waffle iron.
Homes & Gardens loves this durable, natural wooden set of kitchen utensils. They're hand-wash only but heat-safe and non-toxic, unlike black plastic utensils, which release harmful microplastics into your food and have been linked with health issues.
Onto entryways and halls
That was a real stint spent organizing your kitchen and dining areas, but so useful to improve functionality in the heart of your home. Now we move on to the hall and entryway:
- Get rid of old, broken umbrellas.
- Edit down your collection of coats, boots, and shoes (are any too small or too old?). Place out-of-season clothing in storage under your bed. Homes & Gardens recommends lidded plastic storage bins available from Amazon.
- Declutter hats, scarves, and gloves (match up the gloves – donate any that you can’t match or that you don’t like anymore).
Time to tackle bedrooms, closets and bathrooms
If your winter items are still lurking around, use some smart ways to store your clothes in the longer term to clear space, especially as you now move into decluttering the bedroom, closet and bathroom:
- Declutter the bedside tables and remove anything that doesn’t belong there. Put books on the shelf or donate them. Toss/recycle used-up lotions.
- Declutter the closet. Remove all wire hangers (donate them to your dry cleaner), remove clothes that are too small, too big, or that you won’t wear.
- Streamline the closet shelves. Remove, donate, or recycle things that are hiding at the back of the closet shelves that you don’t like.
- Declutter the bathroom, including any items around the tub and shower. Remove and toss or recycle any soaps or shampoos that you are no longer using. It's a good time to do an expiration sweep.
- Streamline your vanity. Toss or recycle any products you are no longer using or need.
- Cut down the number of items under the bathroom sink. Toss or recycle any products you are no longer using. Group like products. Homes & Gardens recommends using small organizing bins, available from Walmart to keep this organized moving forward. Donate any items you have an overabundance of that have never been opened.
- Declutter your makeup and skincare. Toss anything that’s too old or that you don’t like. Pro-tip: When you buy makeup, write the date on it using a permanent marker, available from Amazon, so you remember when you bought it. Makeup expires, as displayed in the symbol of an open pot on the product. The number inside is the number of months the item will be good for after opening.
- Reduce your collection of towels, sheets, and pool towels. Donate or recycle any sheets that don’t fit a bed you have, or which are threadbare. Donate old towels to your local veterinarian. Pro-tip: roll towels and group them by size. They fit better on the shelf that way. Keep sets of sheets together by folding them and putting them inside of one of the pillowcases.
This six pack of bed sheet organizers will help you group together bedding sets and keep your cabinet permanently organized. The windows help you identify which set is where and will keep your bedding from falling prey to moths.
Children's bedrooms or guest rooms
If you have rooms for children or grandchildren, now's the time to tackle them in this 30-day decluttering challenge If you don't have any, focus the next three days on on guest rooms or spaces:
- Streamline the child’s closet. Remove any clothes that are too small and donate them.
- Tackle any toys in this room and remove and donate any that your child has aged out of. If they are in good condition, keep them in a labeled container if you plan to have more children. Otherwise, donate them to a local daycare or school.
- Declutter and organize craft supplies. This is a hot spot for duplication. Edit down collections of pens, pencils, and crayons, making sure to toss any broken ones, as well as used-up coloring books, and random bits of paper. Test markers and get rid of the ones that are dried up.
If you don't have a dedicated storage idea for any kids' crafts, they will easily take over a room. Having a finite amount of storage, such as this compartmentalized clear box that's perfect for coloring apparel, means you will more easily keep track of what you have.
Odds and ends
You're now at the final stretch of this 30-day decluttering blitz, and it's the perfect time to tackle the odds and ends in and around your home:
- Sort out your car's glove box – remove old registrations and insurance cards. It's a good time to tackle the boot, seat, and door pockets.
- Pare down your jewelry. Match up earrings, donate or sell jewelry you no longer want to wear. It's possible to declutter sentimental items with some expert tips.
- Streamline the junk drawer in the kitchen, or anywhere else in the home it has ended up. Toss anything you know you don’t need. Instead, keep essentials for the junk drawer instead, such as batteries, a flashlight, sticky tape, and permanent pens, which often are needed but not always easily found.
- Reassess your suitcases and travel bags. Remove and donate any that are still in good condition that you don’t use.
- Declutter the laundry room. Take wire hangers back to the dry cleaner and remove any products you’re no longer using. It's a good time to clean your laundry space as well, as it's often overlooked but a prime spot for mold and mildew due to the heat and humidity.
You don't need lots of different cleaning tools cluttering up your home. Homes & Gardens news writer Ottilie Blackhall tried and loved this nifty system. It's easy to use and store, versatile, and comes with a glass cleaner squeegee, tile scrubber, grout brush, surface cleaner, and telescopic duster.
Congratulations on completing my simple and effective 30-day decluttering blitz! However, if you didn't manage it all, or need more time, that's OK too. Doing a little decluttering is always better than nothing.
We reckon it's time to ditch housekeeping perfection as doing something halfway, is better than not doing it at all.
For more ideas on methods to try, delve into Homes & Garden's decluttering library, organized by problem area of the time you have available to commit to the task. The Solved team has tried and tested every single one.
