Over the summer, after a very long pause due to writing my last book, we finally got going on the unfunness of remodeling. We had our popcorn ceilings scraped and repainted, our floors replaced, and most of our rooms repainted.
It’s not even what I consider “real” remodeling (knocking down walls and such), but it was stressful.
The biggest stress factor was moving every last thing out of a room (or several rooms) so the remodeling could happen.
For someone who struggles with clutter more than the average person, this makes my heart palpitate. Just the thought of moving every last thing makes me short of breath.
I was determined to use what I’ve learned about decluttering to make this process as doable and profitable as possible.
Doable = least likely to drive me into Crazy Town.
Profitable = if I’m going to do all that work anyway, I might as well declutter, too.
Get the Duhs Out First
What are Duhs? Things that, at a glance, I know need to be donated.
I focused on opening up as much space as possible within my home, as quickly as I possibly could.
Open space is like gold when you need to empty one room into another room.
I cleared my Donation Spot in the garage. That box/pile-of-boxes is always there, as I’m forever decluttering. It was first to go because it was easy and obvious.
Then, my perspective turned ruthless and Duhs I hadn’t noticed before revealed themselves.
The end table I hated and had been meaning (for years) to replace.
The ottoman that doubled as uncomfortable seating during a party, but which we tripped over every other day of the year.
The humongous, life-threatening yoga ball that was shoved in a corner after an in-the-dark trip to the restroom when I ran into it and was rolled/thrust/launched onto the floor, barely missing a collision between my face and the bedpost. I never used it anyway.
Those items leaving freed up square footage I needed for this process. In those first bursts of expended energy, I took stuff straight to the car. It never had to be touched or thought of or lugged again. There’s something incredibly satisfying in that.
Take It There Now
Unless you’re brand spankin’ new around here, you know this phrase/mantra/game-changer well. It’s the decision/concept/mindset that has changed my home and allowed me to make real decluttering progress after years of Stuff Shifting (moving things around, thinking I was decluttering, but not actually making sustainable progress because stuff wasn’t actually leaving my house).
I’ve eliminated Keep Boxes and Keep Piles and all sorts of other Procrastination Stations. With my personality, temporary homes are my enemies.
And this is where the remodeling process is extra difficult. Moving everything out of one room means everything has to go to a temporary home. There’s no avoiding this reality. It’s the ultimate Stuff Shifting.
But my goal, as I was forced to touch every last thing in there anyway, was to not touch anything twice that did not absolutely have to be touched twice.
The first three steps in my decluttering process helped me do this, though not necessarily in order. They were just easy ways to eliminate anything I could possibly eliminate on first touch.
Step One: Trash. Step Two: Easy Stuff (anything with an already established home). Step Three: Stick Duhs in the Donate Box.
It wasn’t a situation for decluttering questions since we were on a deadline, but there was no reason NOT to use the work I was doing anyway to make decluttering progress.
As I worked, I always had my essential, minimal decluttering supplies by my side.
Anything that needed to go in the trash went straight in the black trashbag. (There’s nothing more frustrating than things that should have been trashed taking up precious space and “waiting” to be moved back into the room.)
As I came across things that were easy (in this space for whatever reason even though they had an established home somewhere else), I made a conscious decision to take them to their rightful home immediately.
This one was hard. I was in a hurry. There was so much to do and a deadline looming. Wouldn’t it be easier to scoop? To shove it all in a box?
Temporarily? Maybe. Except that I’d need more boxes and more space in the temporary home.
And I’ve changed over the course of my deslobification process.
The thing that has finally given me hope, helped me make real and lasting progress, and cured the decluttering-ends-up-causing-a-bigger-mess issue is taking things where they go immediately.
If I touched something that was easy, I looked around for anything else in the space that needed to go to the same general area of the house, and I took all those things to their homes immediately.
I also had my donatable Donate Box with me at all times. Touching every last thing reveals A LOT of Duhs. If something could go into the Donate Box without any analysis needed, it did.
I’m definitely not claiming to have done the moving process perfectly, but eliminating clutter as I packed instead of assuming it would be easier to deal with it on the other end helped me make a lot of progress and reduced the amount of space I needed to temporarily store things.
Put Things Back Thoughtfully
As much as possible, I took my time putting things back. Instead of shoving it all back in, I spent an entire day on each of my kids’ rooms, placing each item in its final resting place. Instead of letting myself think, “That would look great on the wall in my daughter’s room!” and then shoving it into a cabinet (like I’d done before), I acted on that thought. I put it on the wall. If it didn’t look good on the wall, it went in the Donate Box.
Taking my time on this part also helped our brains adjust to open space. My daughter decided she didn’t want several large things to come back into her room. “I just really like having the space, Mom.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that.
My cautionary preaching break
I am not advising that you pull everything out of a room as a decluttering strategy. That’s the traditional decluttering strategy that got me in way too much trouble. It’s the exact opposite of the Decluttering Without Making a Bigger Mess method I use and teach.
Life happens and the stuff ends up in No Man’s Land indefinitely.
I am taking full advantage of the pull-everything-out situation that is happening whether I take full advantage of it or not. I’m making the best of an unfun experience.
But being forced to do things this way has also been a reminder of why I shouldn’t do things this way. I plan to write a post on that soon.
I know so many of you have lived through real remodels and intense home improvement projects. I’d love to hear your hard-learned advice!
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Maybe you are too young to remember the ottoman from the Dick Van Dyke show! LOL
THIS is exactly why we haven’t replaced our 30 year old carpets. The thought of having to shift EVERYTHING around to get our flooring replaced overwhelms me. I know that it’s time to face the battle because even paying the professionals to clean makes no visible difference. I will have to join Instagram to see your progress in action. It will be encouraging; I just know it! Thanks for sharing, Dana!
I’m planning some remodeling projects for next year, so I want to use your example as inspiration to declutter as much as possible this fall. Count me as another one who has kept 23-year-old carpet with crazy kid stains (youngest is 20) in the upstairs bedrooms partly because of the hassle of pulling everything out.
We are doing a similar remodel. We moved everything out once in August for hardwood installation, only to have the installer tell us moisture level of floors was too high. It’s now sept 27th and we still have 54 cartons of wood sitting in our house and waiting for moisture levels to lower. We had some crawl space work done to fix the problem. I decided to take advantage of this “bonus” time to paint. I am also trying to go through our junk while we wait for this project to happen. I want to be intentional about what I bring back in. It’s sooo hard though, because I struggle with getting rid of it. Thank you for your tips and advice and for sharing your own struggles. It’s like we are clutter sisters. I relate to and have gone through so much of what you have with regards to stuff.
I put some duhs out by the road yesterday. And by me, I mean my husband.
😉 A table, and 2 chairs we have no room for, since we just moved this month. And a personally painted by my artist sis in love mailbox, that I’ve never even used, but been hauling around for 2 years. But I love it! But never even used it…. you know that argument well!
Congrats on your new ceilings and floors!
I did this but sort of backwards. 🙂 I wanted a new sofa and really took my time looking for one that I would love, and it turns out it would take six weeks to arrive, so in that time I donated the old one on Freecycle (“no rips, stains, tears, or bugs”) and lived without a sofa for six weeks. It seemed like the perfect time to get the floors sanded and re-finished so I had the rent-a-husband come over and we moved everything out of the living room – either storing in the mudroom or parlor or donating it, and he took some things for himself.
My living room looks amazing now, I moved one leather club chair to the parlor, so there’s a more sparse minimalist look in the living room, and I donated two chairs from the parlor so that room is shaping up to be really minimalist now too. And the floors look amazing. I love that the focus of my rooms is not the furniture but the books and the plants.
Remodels and redecorating (“down” decorating since I decluttered at the same time?) are great times to re-think your stuff!
Oh man. I had my 5th baby (boy) in January. We home school. My husband started a new demanding job that requires travel. We remodeled our kitchen in March because of a roof leak (insurance claim, extra hassle). The construction company was poor at communicating and finishing their work. 2 months later we found the house of our (current) dreams 3 miles away and decided to move. We were in the new house 6 weeks after finding it, which included selling our house and living at the inlaws. We’ve been in the new house for almost 2 months now and this is the only thing I have to say — after a year of doing a good job keeping up with clutter and purging (thank you Dana!!!) I am done. I stalled out. The clutter is gone but I am having a hard time moving in. I don’t want to unpack boxes and get the rest of the things out of the garage. School has started again so all I can keep up with is the everyday “keep the wheels turning” stuff. I just keep singing that old Patch the Pirate song… “little by little, inch by inch, by the yard it’s hard, by the inch what a cinch, never stare up the stairs, just step up the steps… little by little, inch by inch. ” 🙂 Sometimes you just need a vacation!!
You are brilliant for decluttering both as it comes out and as it goes back in! I retired after 33 years in the military and thought that I should just move everything to my post-military home since I’d be retired and have sooooo much time to do it then. Plus the military pays by the pound if you move yourself, so I moved a lot of Duh’s. Fast forward 7 years and there are still boxes upon boxes that haven’t been unpacked in my last 3 moves! My excuse was getting a 4-year advanced degree (homework trumps decluttering, right?). Your books have been so encouraging as I now realize I’ve been stuff-shifting for decades! No wonder I was happiest in a 3rd world country with only what I could carry in my ruck (backpack). Thanks so much for your humor and insight. Your books are finally getting me on track with methods that work & have me laughing out loud as I go.
I was just forced to do this when my extremely large closet (the kind with the Christmas tree etc. in it) developed a leak. I had to quickly empty everything. It messed up four rooms. What I learned doing it was the top shelf has to go, I can’t manage bins up there on my own. Also though it was neat and tidy, that’s just way too much stuff for one person to manage. So nothing is going back without a good think. And finally, I did buy some plastic bins and am putting some things in there just in case the roof problem isn’t perfectly addressed yet, plastic is my friend!
Procrastination Stations! Oh what a good name for them.
Years ago I took a life improvement course. It really did improve my life. (For example, I’m much more comfortable in social situations.). But it had one piece of advice that has turned out to be a terrible Achilles’ heel for me: “a good way to get unstuck is to clear your desk. Just take all the clutter off and put it in a box.”
Well. Mm-hmmmm. Now accumulated over the course of years I have a lot of those desk-clearing boxes aka procrastination stations. Not good!
So from reading this blog, I’m now done with procrastination stations. Touch it once!
I used to do this when I was tidying up ( a.k.a stuff-shifting) to prep for my New Year’s Eve parties. I had several years’ worth of boxes upstairs in my storage room. One year I went through them and discovered how much stuff becomes irrelevant (and thereby recyclable) if you just leave it alone for a while. I just pulled last week’s box out from under my desk, and am dealing with it.