The Quickest Way to Purge & Clean a House & Get Rid of Clutter
When your house is filled with clutter, getting rid of it can seem like an insurmountable task--especially because once you're done tossing the junk, your house will still need a thorough cleaning. Don't despair, because you can purge and clean your house in much less time than you think. Does this Spark an idea?
The 15-Minute Plan
If you want to declutter your house as quickly as possible, it might seem counterintuitive to decide you're only going to work on it for 15 minutes a day. However, if you have a clutter problem, you're most likely overwhelmed by the idea of having to purge so much stuff. If you try to do it all at once, the sheer magnitude of your task might make you give up in despair. With chronic clutterers, this pattern repeats itself: they attempt to clean up their mess, find the task too daunting, give up, and try to ignore it for a while, possibly accumulating more stuff in the process. Then they become disgusted with the clutter, and the cycle begins all over again. Breaking the work up into 15-minute chunks makes it much more manageable, and will actually result in you decluttering your home more quickly than if you tried to tackle it in one go. If even 15 minutes seems too long to focus on purging your stuff, break it up into several five minute chunks and scatter them throughout your day.
Toss, Donate, Keep
Decluttering expert Marla Cilley, also known as FlyLady, advocates a lightning-speed purging technique she calls the 27-Fling Boogie. This entails going through your house as fast as you can and collecting 27 items to throw away. You put them all in a garbage bag, run outside to the trash, and toss them in. Next, Cilley instructs, do the same thing, but this time, collect 27 items to give away. Put them in a box and take them to your car: the speed at which you do this will eliminate your urge to second-guess and convince yourself to keep some of the clutter.
An easier paced, but still fast and effective, way to do this is to sort your clutter into three bins: One for stuff you want to keep, one for stuff you're going to throw away, and one for stuff you're donating. If you're going through a dresser, do one drawer at a time--follow the 15-minute plan, and don't try to do too much decluttering all at once. Take the drawer and pour its contents onto a clear patch of floor. Begin sorting the stuff into your three bins. When you're done, put the stuff from the "Keep" bin back into the drawer neatly. Take the stuff in the "Throw Away" bin to the garbage. Finally, take the "Donate" bin to your car.
Speed Cleaning
After you've purged your house of clutter, it will need a good cleaning. Who knows what size dust bunnies have been lurking under all that stuff? You might be tempted to clean the entire house in one go. If you think you can complete the task, go ahead. Chronic clutterers, however, might find that the same rule applies to cleaning as to decluttering. Attempting to clean the whole house may take you a long time--perhaps days, weeks, or even months. Instead of taking on your entire domicile, tackle a few tasks at a time, and do a little every day.
According to home cleaning and organizing experts David Bowers and Laura Dellutri, speed cleaning works best if you break up your cleaning into daily and biweekly tasks. In the living-room, for example, your daily tasks will include putting each piece of clutter where it lives and cleaning small messes on the floor with a wet rag or handheld vacuum. Every two weeks, dust, vacuum, sweep and clean surfaces. Your daily living-room cleaning will take about three minutes, while your biweekly tasks will be about 12. This is a quick way to keep your house clean without overwhelming yourself with too many cleaning tasks.
Tags: your house, away them, biweekly tasks, Clean House, Clean House Clutter, going through, House Clutter
