Is your bedroom a cluttered mess? Growing up, mine was, but it didn’t have to be. I eventually figured out how to tame the clutter and I want to help you declutter your bedroom too!
With my bedroom being the only space I could contain all of my stuff and keep it away from my siblings and have me time, my room was usually a mess. Especially since my room was the smallest one in the house. Not quite Harry Potter closet under the stairs small, but it wasn’t big.
Declutter Your Bedroom? Why is it so hard!?
If you have a messy bedroom, trying to declutter your bedroom can seem like a daunting task. Especially if you have a lot of stuff in a small space. Quite often when I see people with cluttered bedrooms, they have too much stuff, a lack of organization, and even clothing on the floor.
This makes for a frustrating place to live. It’s not good for your mental health and quite frankly it causes a lot of people stress just thinking about the idea of having to clean it up.
The more stuff you have in your room, the messier it looks, the more difficult it will seem mentally to clean it up. I assure you, this is purely a mental blocker. Actually decluttering your bedroom is easy!
Step 1: Assess The Situation.
The first thing you will want to do is assess the situation. Why do you want to declutter your bedroom? What is it that is making your bedroom seem cluttered?
Is it that you have large furniture in there? Do you have laundry that needs to be put away? Are your shelves overflowing with stuff? Do you have stuff on the floor?
Make a list of the problem areas in your room and divide it up into sections so that we can tackle them.
Step 2: Get rid of the garbage.
Now if you are lucky, you don’t have any garbage in your room. Consistently having garbage in my room that wasn’t confined to a trash bin would probably be grounds for divorce in our house.
But let me tell you, it’s not uncommon. I was a slob growing up. I grew up with hoarders and it took a lot for me to break from their habits and form my own.
As it turns out, the ability to walk through my room without stubbing my toe on things is something I really value. If you’ve got garbage in your bedroom, start by getting rid of it.
Now when I say garbage, there are a couple different kinds. First is the kind like candy wrappers on the ground. Hopefully you aren’t that big of a slob. Maybe you are and no judgement, I’ve been there.
There were a few times when I had to throw out old bags from fast food restaurants growing up because it was growing something unidentifiable because I’d gotten so lazy I just didn’t bother to throw it in the garbage. So if you have that type of stuff, start there.
The second type of garbage is things that you really don’t need but aren’t purely trash. Things that can be recycled, trashed, or donated.
For example, I used to do a lot of my computer hobby work in my bedroom before I got a home office. Due to that, I had busted computer parts, notebooks full of things I’d written down for my computers and things I was trying to figure out, old electronics. It was a lot.
So as I started decluttering garbage, I started getting rid of those types of things with reckless abandon. I had to be honest with myself. No, that hard drive with the bad sectors is never going to be useful again. I don’t need a Network switch from 15 years ago that will bottleneck my entire network.
Now granted, I’m using computers as my hobby here, but whatever hobby you have can fit in that same space just as well be it photography, playing RPGs, or knitting.
Just make sure you get rid of that garbage and you will go a long ways in the process of decluttering your bedroom.
Step 3: Identify Things That Don’t Belong There
This is common whenever you are decluttering. Things tend to show up in various spots that don’t belong there and then they just kind of live there…forever.
Case in point, there was a screwdriver that was living in my home office for the better part of a month. It didn’t belong there. I’d been using it to replace one of the drives on my home server and then the kids woke up and I forgot to take it back downstairs where it belonged. Every day I looked and it was still there. Things like that happen…a lot.
So it’s up to you when you declutter your bedroom, to look through your clutter and put things back in their proper home. Immediately. Don’t pass go. Don’t collect $200, just put anything that is out of place in its proper home.
Step 4: Identify Reoccurring Problems
Now I call this reoccurring problems because it could encompass a lot of things. But lets face it, most of the time this reoccurring problem is laundry. People hate doing laundry. I hate doing laundry.
There was a period in my life where I would do my laundry, dump it on my bed so that my laundry basket was empty, then I’d move it from the bed to my chair so I could sleep in the bed, then from the chair back to the bed so I could use the chair.
Repeat until the laundry was all back in the basket and needed to be washed again. I’m not proud of that and it was not efficient. So I made a rule. When I did laundry, it got put away as soon as I pulled it out of the dryer no matter what. Every single time.
Reoccurring problems are most often the cause of not budgeting your time to do something. Whether that is because you don’t want to do it or you find other stuff to do, like rush off to work.
It all has to do with time management. The solution to reoccurring problems is scheduling. I can hear you groaning now, but this really does work.
Much in the same way that I schedule myself to do dishes and reset the kitchen and living room every night, I schedule myself to clean up problem areas in my bedroom. Once a week, the laundry gets done and I always throw it on the bed. Old habits die hard right?
The difference is now as soon as it lands on the bed, I start folding and hanging it. I realized that I can generally get my laundry and my wife’s laundry folded and hung in about 10 minutes. 15 if I make the folding really nice.
The kids laundry is another 20-30 minutes because toddlers go through a ton of clothes. In any event, I have this time built into my weekly schedule to fold the laundry and suddenly that problem area is gone! I no longer have to worry about piles of laundry when I declutter my bedroom!
But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other problem areas. I used to pay bills in my bedroom so there was always a pile of mail. Again, scheduling time to get rid of the mail fixed the issue. Schedule! Schedule! Schedule! Scheduling is a key part of the maintenance process to declutter your bedroom and keep it that way!
Step 5: Remove Large Useless Items
I’ve caught some flak from people on this before, but it’s time for real talk. That treadmill that is in your bedroom and hasn’t been turned on for 3 years. It’s time for it to go.
If you’ve got large items that really don’t serve a purpose in your bedroom anymore, don’t be afraid to get rid of them. Just because they might be nice things, don’t get pulled into sunk costs. It’s time to live in the now.
I called out the treadmill because I was having a conversation with someone just last week where they were complaining that the treadmill in their bedroom took up so much room but they hadn’t used it in years. Realistically if you haven’t used it in a year, you aren’t likely to start now. Get rid of it.
That chair, do you ever use it or does it just collect laundry and jackets? If it never gets used for its intended purpose, it’s time for it to go. You’d be amazed at how much you can declutter your bedroom and free up space just by getting rid of large things.
Step 6: Take Advantage of Existing Storage
If things are out and about and you don’t want to look at them, take advantage of the existing storage in your room. I started keeping my headphones and a few other items in a drawer on my nightstand because I don’t like the clutter of looking at them.
This visually cleaned up my nightstand so that it only had things in that I wanted there and nothing extra. For my watches and watch bands, I didn’t need those out. So I hid them away in a drawer.
Anything that didn’t need to be out and I knew I wanted to keep, I found homes for. Even if that meant displacing something I cared about less so that item could find a home. Focus on visual things when you declutter your bedroom, then find homes for them in your existing storage.
Step 7: Let Things Go
This is the hardest step. You’ve cleared out a bunch of stuff already, you’ve made more room, but you’ve still got a bunch of stuff and it still looks like you need to declutter your bedroom.
If you are still above your clutter threshold, it’s time to start letting things go. I like to use the container method for this. I had too many books for my bookshelf so I went through them and used the shelf as a container for them. I only allowed myself to keep the books that would fit on the shelf and everything else had to go.
The solution was not to go out and get more shelves. That would only serve to make the room look more cluttered. Remember, the goal is to declutter your bedroom, not make it more cluttered. Use the space you have to your advantage to help yourself cull down the items in your bedroom.
Make the container is your enemy. So if things don’t fit in there, it’s not your fault, it’s the container’s. Now I love hats. I have a few dozen ranging from beanies to top hats. I was running out of room.
So when I was decluttering, I only had room for 20 of my hats. I put the hats in their home based on what ones I wanted to keep and I had 5 leftover. 5 hats that I really liked.
I liked them better than some of the other hats up on the shelf, so I swapped them out. The 5 that were left, I got rid of. Not because I didn’t like the hats, but because there were others I liked better and I didn’t have room for them all.
The container was the enemy and I put the blame of me getting rid of extra hats on that container, which made me feel better about my decision.
Some things you just need to take a hard look at and ask yourself if they provide any value to your life that they are worth the space. Are you holding on to it because it was an expensive gift?
Maybe you liked it at the time and you don’t care about it now. Prices others paid and just because you’ve had it a long time aren’t good reasons to keep it. Take a picture of it if you really want to remember it, then get rid of it if you don’t like it.
Think about your present you and not who you were in the past or the future you. That will keep you grounded to only keep things that you care about. Elsa was right. Let it go.
Once you’ve completed these 7 steps, your room should be looking better. You can’t organize your way into a less cluttered room. So when you declutter your bedroom, only you can decide if the room is still cluttered or not.