House Always Messy? Try These Five Things

When your home is a real messity mess, it can feel like an insurmountable task to even start cleaning and impossible to know where to start. If you’ve caught a (clutter)bug that won’t seem to disappear, here’s what to do:

1. Declutter, plain and simple. If your surfaces, countertops and floors are uniformly littered with stuff, instead of simply rearranging the piles to make them *look* neater, it’s time to take a deeper look. Clutter usually falls into two categories: 1) it’s stuff we want to keep that we haven’t yet found a home for/have been too lazy to put away, OR 2) it’s unnecessary stuff that must be dealt with. Most of the time, however, it falls into the first camp. Why? It’s really what’s tucked away in your drawers and cabinets that’s the real clutter culprit.

So if your kitchen countertops are absolutely littered with thingamabobs, check the nearby cabinets and drawers for unused items that might be clogging up space. Once you’ve culled unwanted items from your kitchen, you can give those gadgets a home in a drawer or cabinet (more on that later!). And if you’re wondering why I’m starting with the kitchen, it’s often a hot spot for clutter. If you’re unsure about where to begin decluttering, just start with the place in your home where you spend the most time. Chances are, this space is also the most cluttered.

So grab a bag for donations (those blue IKEA bags are the BEST), and start tossing in any item that fits this description: if you don’t like it, need it, or wouldn’t buy it again today, chances are as good as any that it no longer belongs in your home. Then scoot that bag towards the entryway door, and drop it off at your local charity shop. There are Goodwills, Salvation Army stores and many other thrift stores eager to scoop up your stuff! And if you’d rather recoup some cash for your items, Craigslist is speedy and convenient. And let us not forget friends! Check in and see if anyone in your friend group could use a Zucchini Spiralizer. Once you’ve decluttered, it’s onto the next step:

2. Organize, plain and simple. Organize…what exactly does it mean? Sure, it could be color-coordinating your vegetables in your crisper drawer or alphabetically arranging your cookbooks, but organizing is really about giving items a home and putting them back in the same spot every time. If you’re looking for a magic formula to stay organized, this is it, folks.

So go ahead and take all those items littering your surfaces and give them a place to live. Like that ten pound bag of unopened cat food that’s been sitting on the kitchen countertop for the past five months. Could we store it in an empty bottom shelf? Oh, what’s that you say? You’ve got a popcorn maker on the bottom shelf? And when was the last time you used the popcorn maker? Ah, in college. Could we perhaps donate the popcorn maker and put the cat food there instead? Perfection!

That was a little impromptu role play I did with myself and an imaginary client, in the interest of showing you how easy it is to shuffle things around to create space (no matter the size of your space). Whether you decide to put stuff away immediately after decluttering, or hit pause for a second, *always* declutter first before organizing. Shoving clutter in drawers doesn’t count!

3. Create a command center. One of the best things you can do to nip clutter in the bud is implement a command center. While it may sound like a Jetson-esque room in a space station with a lot of screens and buttons, it’s quite simply a zone near your entryway that you designate for your wallet, keys, mail, outgoing items, and coats and shoes. If you live in a house, this might be your mudroom. If you live in an apartment, this will simply be located by your front door.

Having a command center will set you up for success in two ways: it’s the first thing you interact with when you walk in your home, so when you routinely put things away right away, this trains your brain to put everything else away in the rest of your home. It also prevents all those entryway items from migrating to the rest of your home and cluttering up your space. This might seem like a minor step to take in the grand scheme of your clutter, but it is TRULY transformative. Create one today and watch what it does for the rest of your space.

Consider an entryway shoe rack to turn that pile of boots and sneakers into something more manageable. Can’t be bothered to hang your coats in your closet? Hang them on a nearby coat rack. No tray for your mail? There are many nice-looking ones floating out there ready to make your life easier. No place for all those random to-dos, like Dry-Cleaning and Amazon returns? Grab a bin (surely, you have an extra bin banging around the house) and plunk it down in your entryway.

4. Tidy each day for 10 minutes. Taking ten minutes at the end of each day to put everything back where it belongs is often the difference between an always-messy home and an always-neat home. The good news is that once you’ve decluttered and organized your space, tidying up will be a walk in the park. It won’t be a painful guessing game of “where do I shove these random cords today?” Instead, it will be an easy saunter over to the cords bin.

And no more sitting on dog toys! Just plunk them into a nearby rope bin and you’re finished. If your home is routinely messy, I recommend setting a calendar reminder in your phone each and every day. At first that bell will be like nails on a chalkboard, but you’re training your pavlovian brain to develop a new habit. With time, you won’t need that reminder anymore, and this whole business of tidying will become second-nature.

5. Make more mindful purchases. Before you roll your eyes into the back of your head permanently, this might be the most important tip in this bunch (tied with decluttering). To break the painful and seemingly endless cycle of decluttering and organizing (with the exception of a few decluttering and organizing tune-ups here and there), it helps to think twice before you swipe (like Tinder!).

If you’re wavering on an item, really consider whether you’ll get long-term use out of it, or if it’s a passing urge that will fade. For this reason, I like to keep items saved in a shopping cart and return to them later in the week. If my interest has waned, I know it’s not meant to be. Just imagine your future self having to wade through all this future clutter. Space is always better than clutter, I say! And I think you might agree.

There is no magic wand to wave away the chaos, but if you follow these five steps, this will transform that messy home into a nearly-always clean one.