The Living Room. The Family Room. Whatever you want to call it, this is the place where you spend time with your family. Where you entertain, where you bond and make memories.
So when this room is a cluttered mess, it really messes with your head. Trust me. I get it. While I would never expect this room to be spotless, if it’s got too much going on then it becomes less of a pleasant place to spend time and more of a headache. In this article I am going to go over some way to declutter your living room and make it more livable.
So How Do You Declutter Your Living Room?
Step 1: Start Small
Seasonal Decoration
As you look around your living space, try to identify small things you can eliminate to make it less cluttered and more of a space you want to live in.
Removing leftover seasonal decorations is a quick and easy way to declutter your living room. When I was going through this process, I was asking myself: why did we still have stuff out from Easter? Easter was a couple months ago. Things like this are an easy fix to declutter your living room by just putting things away to free up space.
Actual Trash
Being that we have two very young kids, trash tends to get left on flat surfaces. If you’ve got kids, you know how it is. If you don’t have kids, then you aren’t aware that they will pick up random things off the ground and call them ‘trash’ and hand them to you.
Or you will be in the middle of opening something for them and then have to sprint across the room to go prevent the other child from getting into something they shouldn’t because you realized someone left something down that they shouldn’t have.
Then that trash gets left behind. These are all easy wins when you are trying to declutter your living room.
Things You Don’t Like
If you’ve got things in your living room that you don’t like, get rid of them! Just because you own something, doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Getting rid of things you dislike can go a long ways towards decluttering your living room.
For example, we had all these ceramic vases and figurines that had been gifted to us. Neither my wife or I liked them and with kids they were increasingly becoming a safety hazard.
They were a ton of small items but eliminating them meant that we suddenly not only had physical space free but we also were a bit more free mentally because we didn’t constantly have to worry about toddlers breaking them.
Blankets and Pillows
Next we tackled blankets and pillows. For whatever reason we collect blankets and pillows whether we mean to or not. And with toddlers they inevitably end up on the floor. Daily.
I realized we don’t need 6 pillows for a single couch. We need 2 tops. So I chose my favorites and the rest went away. Blankets that weren’t in regular use got the same treatment. Folded up and put away, donated, or in the case of some of the really destroyed ones, they went into the trash. If you want to declutter your living room, get rid of all the extra blankets and pillows and just keep what you need.
Kids Toys
Since it’s a living room, there were a ton of toys as well. There is nothing wrong with having kids toys in your living room. It’s a place where the family spends time and interacts together. However, you don’t need every toy in the world in the living room.
So, when you declutter your living room, toys are easy to eliminate. I spent an evening after the kids went to bed and cleared out a ton of toys that were no longer age appropriate for them and that they never played with.
I was lucky that our neighbors down the street had new grandchildren and were looking for toys in the age range of stuff we were getting rid of and they eagerly took them off my hands. But donation places or your local buy nothing groups work just as well.
Dog Toys
Don’t underestimate how many dog toys you may have when you are decluttering your living room. I made it a point to go through the dog’s toys and eliminated a bunch of things that they had absolutely destroyed.
Our dogs don’t need more toys than our kids. I wasn’t about to get rid of my dog’s favorite toys, but they certainly didn’t need that 10 year old dog toy that looked like it had been through a trash compactor twice.
Other Items
Other things we eliminated were puzzles, games, candles, mail, and random things that had never made it back to their actual home. When you declutter your living room, get things back to their proper home.
Clearly we had an issue with putting things away at night which is something we figured out how to accommodate with daily schedules. All these small things that were just taking up space in our living room were leading to additional stress and making our home look cluttered. These were easy things to get rid of to make the living room more livable.
Step 2: Tackle Your Stressers
Once you’ve gotten rid of the small stuff, take inventory again. When you declutter your living room, you want to tackle the items that are causing you stress.
Now stressers can come in all shapes and forms, so properly identifying them is key. When you are going through the process to declutter your living room, make sure that you look at everything objectively so you can get a clear picture of what actually is causing you stress.
Physical Media
When I was going through this process, I didn’t realize it at first, but one of my biggest stressers was the movie shelf. It was so full and so cluttered. And when I say shelf, I mean bookcase.
I love movies and I have a vast collection of them. But with the advent of streaming I can’t remember the last time I turned on our Blu-Ray player. I’m pretty sure it’s been at least 4 years. So I’m left with this massive bookcase full of DVDs that I don’t watch and that don’t look nice in the family room.
So, I boxed all of them up except for a select few and put them away in storage. I like to keep physical copies because I don’t trust digital services to not yank the titles away after I’ve paid for them as I’ve had that happen to me multiple times before, but that is a different topic.
But since most of what I had was widely available on one of my streaming platforms, there was no use in keeping a massive wall of movies. That alone cleared up a ton of stressers for me.
Then I looked at my cabinet of CDs and records. I don’t even own a CD Player or a record player, so why was I holding onto these? Away they all went! This was even more space decluttered!
Remember, when you declutter your living room, just because something has value doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Physical media does have value to a lot of people, but if you aren’t using it, there is no reason to keep it.
Declutter Your Living Room Furniture
Don’t be afraid to make bold moves! I made a bold move and I decided to get rid of furniture. I had furniture that had followed me around since college.
Some of it looked like it came out of the 70’s. It was bulky, it was ugly. And I hated it. I put it up for free online and within a couple of days it was gone!
You have no idea how freeing it was to not have that big ugly furniture in my living room. The living space is more open and less dark. And I have less to dust!
Now I recognize that not everyone is going to be able to part with furniture. It’s big, it can be expensive to get rid of, and maybe you actually like your furniture. But I put it in there because I want to prove a point.
Just because you’ve got something in your home, even if you spent a lot of money on it. Just because it’s been around a long time, that doesn’t mean you have to keep it. I know I sound like a broken record, but it’s true.
If it stresses you out, get rid of it. Who knows, maybe there is a better option. We realized we didn’t need an entertainment center. Our TV could be wall mounted, and thus out of reach of little fingers and most projectiles that might be thrown by said little fingers.
With the movie collection digitized I no longer needed a bookshelf to hold all of the movies, instead we just have a simple ladder shelf now that holds family photos and our AppleTV. The whole thing is so much less cluttered and takes a fraction of the time to clean.
Step 3: Tackle the Remainder
You’ve decluttered all of the easy things. You’ve moved things back to where they are supposed to go. You’ve taken care of items that directly stress you out.
Your room should be looking pretty good right now. But can you be doing more? Well that’s up to you. As I assessed my space, I realized there were still areas I could improve on.
Yes, I’d cleaned up the clutter but it was still kind of disorganized and that was leading to still causing some stress. So I decided to do a few more things to help reduce the cluttered look.
Declutter Your Living Room Electronics
First, I made the decision to get rid of the Blu-Ray player. It hadn’t been touched in years and we have a gaming system that will play them. It’s slightly less convenient but clearly the convenient option hadn’t made a difference so away it went!
I also had a Fire Stick and a Wii. Neither of them had been touched in ages. I decided it was time for them to go. The Kinect attached to our X-Box hadn’t been used in ages. So it went away too. Remember, If you aren’t using your electronics, it’s OK to get rid of them.
A Little Organization Goes a Long Ways to Declutter Your Living Room
Now when we talk about decluttering, I usually separate out decluttering and organization. With that said, sometimes you’ve decluttered and it still looks bad.
When you declutter your living room, try to identify the focal point of the room and then make sure that area is free from clutter. For us, our focal point was the TV.
The cables coming out of the TV looked like spaghetti. Having a rats nest of cables coming out of your TV, especially when it is highly visible is not good for a decluttered look.
Cable ties are cheap. Or if you don’t want to spend money on those, twist ties from the various things you’ve purchased over the years always come in handy.
I know that even though I am pretty good about throwing twist ties away, we always seem to have at least a half dozen floating around the house at any given time.
Once I was done, all of our cables were organized, wrapped, and grouped so that they looked uniform. Instead of a mess, I had a nicer looking single strand of cables coming out from the TV.
Pro Tip: Pre-Run your Cables for future devices!
Your future self will thank you for this. Inevitably things get swapped out or added. That new game system, maybe a receiver for your cable. When that happens, this means undoing all that work and running new cables.
I hate this. I know what ports the back of my TV has and what is supported on it. It’s 4 HDMI ports and 2 RCA ports. So I ran cables from all the ports from the back of the TV to the shelf where my electronics live.
Even though I don’t currently use all the ports, this has come in handy many times. The next time I added a device to my shelf, I just plugged it in and I was already setup with no need to mess with the cable organization.
It was also great when we dug out our old Nintendo 64, we just plugged it in temporarily and everything was all setup. Or when my cousin brought over her Nintendo Switch, we already had everything setup. It was just plug and play. All without ever having to touch my cable organization.
I also labeled them,so that I knew which HDMI port each one belonged to. The label maker is my best friend. This will help you when you are selecting the device on your TV so you don’t have to scroll through the inputs to find the one you are looking for.
Finally since I still didn’t like the look of the cables, I took one of my bigger framed pictures and put it up on the shelf in front of the surge protector for the power. Now instead of looking at cables, I’m looking at a picture. All I see of the cables when I look over towards the TV is just a neatly wrapped bundle that goes from the TV behind a picture.
Declutter Your Living Room Pictures!
I rather dislike pictures on shelves. To me, it gives a cluttered look. They have their place and we absolutely have them in our house, but it’s not my preference. A big part of that is small kids.
When you declutter your living room, look at your wall space. I realized that we had a lot of wall space and with kids, things on tables and shelves were ripe opportunities for the kids to break them.
So, I moved a lot of pictures to the walls. The results were actually very nice. We used a non-uniform hanging method so that things didn’t have to be lined up with each other and we could add or remove pictures whenever we wanted.
This meant as the kids grow older we could add things without it looking lopsided or weird. This also meant that we had less physical clutter on the tables and shelves.
We also got rid of several of the pictures on the wall. There were things up that we didn’t really care about. Art that we’d gotten just to fill the space so the house didn’t look so bare. Just because you have pictures on the wall, doesn’t mean you have to keep them.
Books!
I don’t know who invented the idea of the ‘coffee table book’ but I hate it. It just looks like clutter. In fact, I hated the coffee table so it went away with other furniture I didn’t like.
Books can look nice in moderation. Too many and you get a cluttered mess. This can be an uphill battle with kids, so you may have to do several passes on the books to get rid of them all.
Most of the books we had got donated. Travel guides from places we had been to before a decade ago were outdated and if we ever did travel to those places again, we’d need updated information. So those went away. We kept the books the kids liked to read and then removed the rest.
Do Another Pass to Declutter Your Living Room
Hopefully by this point you’ve gotten your living room into a decluttered state. If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by it, it means you are still above your clutter threshold and you need to look through it again and see what else you can declutter.
Keep in mind that if you don’t live alone, trying to keep below your clutter threshold can be a lot of work. My wife’s threshold is higher than mine so I see things that bother me and it won’t bother her at all. I also had to adjust my expectations when we had kids. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting.
Step 4: Maintenance
Now that you’ve gotten it decluttered it’s time to figure out how to maintain this newly decluttered space. It’s easier to maintain with less stuff. The way I do it is through schedules.
Every single night I go through and I pick up things and put them in their proper spot. If you’ve got kids that are old enough, you can try to make a game out of it and see how much you can get put away in 5 minutes. This helps with kids toys.
I do a quick pass every night just to make it so that this doesn’t become a huge time sink. Then at least once a week I vacuum and eliminate anything that doesn’t belong in the living room.
This ensures that my wife gets to look at the weekly ads so we know what we are going to meal prep for the next week but nothing stays for too long.
Also, we invested in a robot vacuum for our downstairs. We found one at Walmart for $100 and it has been a game changer. Aside from the occasional annoyances of it getting lost or stuck in random places around the house, we can see a noticeable difference in the cleanliness of our living room.
It picks up a lot of dog hair and crumbs that the kids might have had on their clothes and we missed and it goes on a daily basis. I just incorporated emptying the bin from it into my nightly reset routine. It takes 10 seconds and has made my life so much easier.
I also try to wipe down surfaces in the living room at least once a week. This keeps the dust down. It is possible to have a clean and decluttered living room, it just takes a bit of work. However, once you’ve gotten it clean the work goes down to maintain it.