---

The Great Decluttering and Organising Plan

Phase 1: Get (almost) everything out of the bedroom

Okay, so the goal of this phase is to categorise items, store them together, and get them out of the room. I’m going to tackle a section of the room at a time (e.g., one corner of the room, or under the bed, or a certain shelf etc), and thematically group items together, which will then be stored in bags – like bags for life or ikea bags.

For example, things like makeup, skincare, haircare etc will be stored in a bag with the label “self-care”. Things like pictures, figurines, vases etc will be stored in a bag with the label “décor”. At this point, the only decision being made is which category items fit into. I’m not making any decisions about whether I’m keeping things or throwing them away or whatever, I’m just grouping items together and getting them the fuck out of my bedroom. Of course, if there are really super obvious things that can be gotten rid of, I will do that as I go, but the main goal at this stage is to get the bedroom empty without cognitive overload from decision making. The bags of stuff will be taken somewhere else in the house (more on that later), and tackled another time.

In theory, once phase one is complete, our bedroom should be almost entirely empty – with the exception of furniture and obvious everyday things like clothes and my work stuff. There should be no items on surfaces, and storage places (like drawers and cupboards) should be completely empty, ready to become permanent and logical homes for our things.

---

Phase 2: Clearing out my life, one bag at a time

I’m hoping that by grouping things together in phase one, this bit should feel a lot less overwhelming than trying to declutter an entire room. Because now all I have to do is focus on one category at a time. And because everything has been grouped together into a category, it’s easier to identify easy things to declutter, like duplicate items. Also, because the room is now empty, I can visually see how much storage space I have vs how much stuff I have. So, findings permanent homes for things should be more straightforward.

I plan to go through each bag, one at a time, and decide what will be kept and what won’t. I’m thinking I’ll probably tackle this by emptying the bag onto the floor and sorting everything into three piles; definitely keep, definitely gone, and unsure. Definitely keep will go back into the bag the stuff came from, definitely gone will be removed from the house, and unsure will go into its own bag with an “unsure” label. To keep myself in check and encourage me to make decisions, I’m only allowing myself to have one “unsure” bag for everything in this room. And if/when it becomes full at any point during this phase, I stop going through the main bulk of stuff and must sort through the “unsure” stuff before doing anything else.

Another thing that I think is important here is motivating myself to do this properly. I imagine most people would probably be able to complete this task in a single day. If I go into this with the expectation that this will be finished in a day, I’m just setting myself up for failure and killing off any motivation to complete the job. Instead, my focus is going to remain on one bag at a time. When I have a free half an hour or so, I will choose a bag and sort through it.

At this stage, I’m not finding homes for anything. I’m making zero decisions about where things live, and simply focusing on what I’m keeping and what I’m not. By the time this phase is complete, I should have bags with stuff we’re definitely keeping and one bag with stuff we’re unsure about.

---

Phase 3: Find those things a home!

Okay, this is the bit that could feel really scary, but I’m choosing to remain (potentially naively) optimistic. What I imagine I’ll do at this stage is gather all my bags together so I can see how much stuff we have overall, but also visualise the volume of items within each category. If I can see, for example, that the self-care items bag has a lot more stuff in it than the medicines bag, I can start to picture what kind of storage space I will need for each category. Part of this process also requires thinking practically. Medicines (and other unsafe items) will need to be stored out of reach of our son. I already know that most of my self-care items will need to be stored close to my clothes so that I can maintain my daily habits. So it’s important to think about not only where items will fit, but also where they make sense.

I’ve accepted that a part of this process may include putting different items from the same category in different places in the room. This is perfectly okay, as long as the home they go to makes sense and is easy to maintain. What I’m hoping to achieve by grouping things together is reducing every day cognitive loads because I don’t need to remember where every single item lives. I simply need to remember that toiletries live in ‘this spot’, or stationary lives ‘over there’. I don’t need to be thinking “wait, where did I put the paracetamol?” I’m also hoping that this will help me stay on top of things and put things away. I currently don’t put things away because I don’t know where to put them. But creating this system will mean that everything has a home.

Once this phase is complete, the bedroom should be finished. Some of you may have read this plan and thought “well duh, why didn’t you do that in the first place?” Well Patricia, some of us are wired a little differently and seemingly straightforward things become unnecessarily complicated in our brains. If, however, you read this blog and it resonated with you, welcome! You’re in a safe place.

---

Phase 4: Living with it and seeing if it works

This is the bit that terrifies me the most. Imagine this. We’ve just spent three months sorting through every single item in our bedroom. It looks great, it feels great, it’s tidy, it’s clean, it’s not claustrophobic anymore. BUT. One week later, my moisturiser is not in its designated home, my hairdryer is on the floor next to the mirror, and I’ve got a pile of worn – but not ready to wash – clothes on my desk chair. “AAAAAAH! I just spent months making this place perfect and I still can’t maintain it, what the fuck is wrong with me!?”

No, no. We’re not doing that. Part of the process of finding a practical organisation system that works is actually trying it out and using it. If I initially designate a drawer to store my hairdryer, but keep finding myself leaving it on the floor after using it, then maybe the drawer isn’t the best place to store it. Maybe it needs to go somewhere else where putting it away after using it becomes automatic. If my moisturiser keeps being left somewhere it doesn’t belong, then maybe I need to consider that it needs to belong somewhere else. The goal here is a long-term one. We’re finding a system that works for us, we’re not trying to force ourselves to put things in places that are “aesthetically pleasing” or where naturally tidy and organised people tell us they ‘should’ live.

So, the final stage of the great decluttering and organisation plan is to actually live with it and see how it’s working. If we need to reshuffle some things, fine. But what we’re not going to do is decide after a week that it doesn’t work this way either, so fuck it, let’s just live the way we were before. Accountability is important here; if the room is looking messy at the end of the week, regroup, reflect, and consider what needs to change.

---

The first hurdle

This is important to acknowledge. I mentioned earlier that our family home has a lot of stuff, which means storing things in bags during the sorting and decluttering process is tricky. If we keep the bags in our bedroom, the visual clutter still exists and becomes overwhelming. But I’m not about to spread my entire life all over my in-law’s home, so there is some logistical planning that needs to happen here.

I also mentioned that our bedroom is in the attic. Well, the attic was turned into an extension before my in-laws bought this house. The room we use as our bedroom is huge. And there is a large space outside of our bedroom too. But this is already primarily used as storage. Basically all of our ‘don’t need this right now but will need it when we get our own place’ stuff is stored there. And my in-laws store a lot of their stuff there too; things that most people who have a loft in their home would store in the loft.

During our previous attempts to sort stuff and tidy up, we actually stored the things we don’t need now really neatly (hooray for us!), but it’s gotten rather chaotic again since becoming parents. There was a really nice, clear space out there, but this has been taken up by clothes and items that our son has grown out of, placed pretty carelessly without any sort of organisation.

So, before I can actually commence with phase one of the plan, I need to create room in the attic space outside of our bedroom. This will essentially involve sorting through all of our son’s old stuff and storing it better. Some things we can start with is dismantling his newborn crib and putting his tiny clothes (🥲) into vacuum storage bags – just in case we decide to have another tiny human in the future. This will free up much needed space in that area, and provide us with the room we need to temporarily store all of the stuff from our bedroom, while we’re undergoing phase two.  

---