Ideas to Organize and Declutter Your Apartment for the New Year
Goodbye spring cleaning, hello 2022, and New Year cleaning. With the new year a few weeks behind us, many people feel the pressure to declutter and organize their spaces to welcome the new year. Everyone is looking around for the next great idea on decluttering and organizing their apartment. We’ve tried the Marie Kondo method where you throw out what doesn’t bring you joy, but what if you like many things! Or live in a small space? Sometimes a deep clean is the only answer to organizing your apartment. Here’s our list of tips, tricks, and where to start.
When decluttering – where do you start?
Set yourself up for success
When planning to deep clean your apartment or house, you must start with your prep work. You might be thinking, “what kind of prep goes into deep cleaning? Don’t I just do it?”. And if that works for you, great! But for many, prepping for a large task like this can help it seem smaller, and you can make decisions faster and easier.
Set a specific date for cleaning
Setting aside a specific date to deep clean and keeping your calendar free on that day can ensure that you don’t continue to put it off or avoid it.
Make a schedule on what items/clutter to start with
Since it’s January, the easy option for many is to start by cleaning, organizing, and decluttering Christmas and Holiday gifts as well as decorations. Still have those gifts from your parents sitting out or not returned? Take care of those first. When you start this way, you’ll have an easier time cleaning stuff that you may not have gotten to.
Have a positive attitude
Listen. No one wants to spend a weekend cleaning out their house. We understand. But a positive attitude can make all the difference when it comes to tedious tasks like this. Be excited about your clean space; you deserve it.
How to decide what to clean and what stays or goes
When you want to get to everything in your home and do a mass deep clean, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start and stick to one task. Once you see something that needs organizing, you stop organizing something else, and nothing ever gets done. Here are a few tips on prioritizing your cleaning and what to focus on. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
Start from Easiest to Hardest
Sometimes difficult problems have easy solutions. For many starting their organization journey, going in order of easiest to hardest of things to clean can vastly help organize and provide structure to your cleaning extravaganza. Or similarly, starting from Hardest to easiest can make the tasks seem small as time goes on.
Four boxes method
Many people starting on their organization journey do the four boxes method. If you have a lot of stuff, though, you might need more than four boxes! Label them with, Donate, Sell, Keep, and Trash. This way, when you are trying to finish this all by sorting your stuff to the right place, you will know exactly where it goes.
Bringing back Marie Kondo
A tried and true method of many organized people and celebrities, if you’re having trouble deciding what stays and what goes, try the Marie Kondo method. This method is based upon what brings you joy. If you touch the item and it no longer brings you joy, you get rid of it. Similarly, you can also use the rule that get rid of it if it doesn’t have sentimental value and hasn’t been used in over a year.
Keeping your space clean
After reading all this, you may be thinking that cleaning is the easy part for you its the keeping it clean that’s difficult. But believe us, once you see your space decluttered, you will never want to go back.
Goloadup.com wrote an awesome article about cleaning up your home in 2022, and I think they put it best. “If you still find it hard to let go, remind yourself what you could gain and what your life could look like without all the clutter in the way. You’re making more space in your home and your life for the things you do love. Something interesting happens when we make an effort to get our things and our lives organized. We begin to gain energy and focus on what we love and enjoy when we clear out all the mess around us.“ Good luck!