This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I make a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Disclosure here.
We have decluttered over 600 items from our home in one weekend.
We have been on this journey to minimalism for over a year now, and it still surprises me how much stuff I find to declutter every single time I do this.
As I’m going through this decluttering process, I am finding that it’s getting easier.
I feel like my decision-making muscle is getting stronger.
It’s easier for me to get rid of stuff, and to say “No, I actually don’t need that” and “No, I don’t need to have all of these just-in-case items in my home that are keeping my space and mind cluttered”.
Feel free to watch the video or keep reading below:
Prefer to listen to the podcast? Here you go:
How clutter affects our stress levels
I’ve recently read a study that said the amount of stress that we women feel is directly proportional to the amount of stuff that we have in our homes.
That made so much sense to me, because I felt like I was constantly getting overwhelmed by the state of my home.
It was tidy on the surface as I was constantly trying to keep on top of it. But that effort of trying to keep on top of it was getting way too much for me.
I was feeling really overwhelmed.
I read another study that said getting rid of clutter eliminates 40% of housework in the average home.
How insane is that?
We can spend 40% less time doing chores, cleaning, laundry, and all of these things, simply by getting rid of the items that we don’t really need, and that don’t bring any value to our life.
I believe it was Joshua Becker, a famous minimalist, who said that having less stuff is better than organising more.
I was constantly looking for ways to have a nice storage system, or new baskets for storing things or organising my stuff ‘in a different way’, but I wasn’t getting rid of things.
I was just moving the clutter from one basket to another, thinking I’d organised.
And I was constantly trying to do that and just never feeling satisfied with it.
Plus the results were never really long-lasting. Things would inevitably get into that overwhelming mess very soon afterwards.
Every little thing requires a bit of your time
I do find that pretty much every little thing that we have and that we own in our home requires a tiny bit of our time.
Even if it’s something tiny.
The more stuff we have, the more time it’s going to require from us.
There’s a saying I’ve heard a lot back in Romania when I was growing up.
“You should keep all things, because they don’t require to be fed”.
There was a scarcity mindset because, during communism, people didn’t know when they were going to get or be able to buy a certain thing.
So a lot of people were gathering resources and trying to keep things ‘just in case’.
But the thing is that, in the age that we live in right now, we can get anything we need online.
We can even get things to our door the next day, or we can pop into the shop quickly and get anything that we might need.
We have an abundance of resources available to us all the time.
Of course, it depends on where we live in the world and what our situation is, but for many of us, we have everything available to us.
We do not need to keep all of this clutter in our homes ‘just in case’.
The saying that I grew up with, that things don’t need to “be fed”, was based on the assumption that things don’t require your attention, so you just keep them there in storage.
But the thing is, they do require your attention.
Maybe not right now, but they will someday down the line.
For example, if you have a garage full of stuff (no judgement whatsoever because we were at that point too), that stuff is going to require your time at some point.
You are going to have to declutter at some point; you are going to have to move things around.
If you move house, you’re going to have to deal with all of that.
Maybe you’re going to look for something through all the clutter, and it’s going to take up your time to find it (and sometimes you won’t even find it).
This happened to us a while back, we spent hours on a few weekends because we found that all of a sudden the shed got damp.
All the things that were on the floor of the shed got ruined.
We had to take everything out and, obviously, toss things away because they were in no good condition anymore, some of them had gotten mouldy.
Incidents like this just take up more of your time each time you have to deal with them.
How I started becoming a minimalist
When I started on this journey, I was also about to have another baby and I thought, “If I’m overwhelmed now, before having a baby, I can only imagine how I’m going to feel after I have her”.
That’s kind of what started this minimalism journey for me.
I am in this really busy season of life, and I don’t want to spend all of my time cleaning, tidying and taking care of my home.
Of course, there are certain chores to keep on top of and keep the house looking nice, but I don’t want to be spending all of my time doing that.
I want to spend time with my family and my children, while also feeling less stressed in my home.
Before you start decluttering, I highly recommend taking a basket, craft bin, or box, whatever you have on hand, just to have a place to put everything you no longer need as you’re decluttering around the home.
Ok, let’s do this!
How I decluttered 600 things in one weekend
1. Paperwork
When I tackled the paperwork, I got rid of probably around 200 pieces of paper.
Doing this, I realised we often keep so many papers.
I had appointment letters from when I was pregnant, from before I was pregnant, pregnancy leaflets, a letter from the government that everyone got when the pandemic started, and just so many useless papers.
There’s so little paperwork that we actually need.
For some paperwork, I took a digital photo of them. You can do this too, scan them on your phone and keep them on Dropbox, Google Photos or something similar.
You don’t need to keep a physical copy of every little paper you own.
Of course, some things are important and you need a physical copy of them, like passports for example, house documents, car papers etc.
But in most cases, you don’t need to keep them.
I managed to get rid of a lot of paperwork, and I kept the ones that we truly need.
I labelled them for each member of our family, plus the paperwork for the house and car.
Now all of them fit in one folder.
I cannot tell you how freeing that feels, to not have huge stacks of paperwork all around the house.
Plus, when I need a document, I know exactly where to go in the folder to find it. It’s way less stressful, doesn’t take up my space in our home, and it just feels amazing.
This is why I highly encourage you to go through your paperwork.
Go a little bit at a time, don’t overwhelm yourself, and get rid of anything you don’t need.
Things that don’t have any sensitive information go straight into the recycling bin.
For the things that have sensitive information, you can take them to a shredding place or rip them to shreds by hand (no need to buy and store a shredder).
2. Baby clothes
I also went through Sophie’s (my baby) wardrobe, which is a chest of drawers.
She doesn’t have that many clothes because she doesn’t need that many.
I went through them quickly and took out anything that didn’t fit her anymore, which was around 20 pieces of baby clothes.
I did order the next size up for her on Vinted (that’s where I get a lot of my baby clothes from, while still keeping it minimal.
No need for a huge stack of baby clothes.
I have a blog post here all about my minimalist kids’ wardrobe.
3. Bath toys
When it came to bath toys, I really wanted to get rid of some of them as they were annoying me.
For example, we had foam letters and numbers.
And my son never really asked for those to play in the bath.
Yet whenever he saw them, he wanted all of them in the bath with him, without playing with them.
And for me, they were such a pain to get out of the bath, dry them, and put them back because they were so tiny and so many!
To make sure he wouldn’t miss them, I first took them and put them in a “quarantine bin” or “decide-later bin”.
He didn’t even notice they were gone, a confirmation that he didn’t really care about them.
Without these around 30 bath toys, things are so much easier to tidy.
4. Makeup
Then I went through my makeup and beauty items.
I had already minimised quite a bit, but I did go through it again.
I took out about 10 products that I knew I was not currently using and probably never going to.
Plus any duplicates, as I don’t think it makes sense to keep duplicates.
5. Artwork and Craft Basket
Next up, I moved into my son’s craft bin.
Now, here’s the funny thing.
I have a huge white basket that I had actually decluttered in the past, but I decided to go even more minimal with it.
I used to hate this craft basket because it’s super heavy.
I kept it up in a kitchen cupboard because I didn’t want him to take out everything at once. But whenever he used to ask for something (be it craft or PlayDoh), I dreaded it.
I knew he would also take out all of the tiny things that were in the basket. And tidying up afterwards was too overwhelming for him, so I would have to do it.
So I thought, how about I take everything out, and keep just a few Play-Dohs and a set of paints?
As a side note, we had two sets of paint, because I had forgotten where I put the first one, I couldn’t find it anymore, so I bought another one.
And then I found the previous one as well, so we had two.
That’s what often happens with clutter — you forget where you put things, you can’t find them, and you end up purchasing more and more, wasting not just time, but also money.
So I went through this basket, and I only kept a few things.
We now have four Play-Dohs, a mat (a white tablecloth to protect the table during crafting sessions), one painting set, a folder to keep some of his artwork, and two cups for water for painting.
Everything else that was in this basket went either in donations, recycling, or in the bin.
This is how I got rid of about 60 items.
And my son hasn’t even noticed.
In fact, it has actually encouraged him to play with Play-Doh a bit more and get more creative with it. And the basket is now at hand underneath the little dining bench that we have in the kitchen.
I am also more inclined to get those out for him to play with because it’s not overwhelming to tidy up. It only takes a few minutes.
6. Camera
Next, I tackled the storage area under our TV, where I had a camera.
A big Nikon camera that I hadn’t used in a long time.
We used to take a few nice pictures with it, maybe once or twice a year. But I have another camera that I use to vlog and create all my content, a Canon G7X camera.
I had been going back and forth between keeping the bigger camera or getting rid of it.
But I realised that for anything that we do need a camera, I can use the main vlogging camera that I have. It does the job perfectly.
So I decided to get rid of the bigger one as it was just taking up space and adding to the clutter.
Plus, in a way I was kind of hogging this resource, this camera that somebody else, maybe a photographer, could enjoy and get a lot of use out of instead of it just gathering dust in my drawer.
Being an older camera, I wasn’t sure if it was worth much anymore, but we ended up putting it on eBay.
We got £250 for it, for something that I wasn’t using and was just cluttering up my space.
You can also read here how I made over £1,437 selling my clutter for cash.
So this camera had to go, plus about five more items, like cords, cables, and chargers.
7. Under the TV stand
Then I also went under the TV in the baskets that had lots of knick knacks, papers and things like that, and I decluttered another about 10 items.
8. Clothes
Moving on to my wardrobe, it was a surprise to notice how many items I still had in there.
I just shared a post on how I got rid of about 80% of my closet, and then I looked in my closet and there were still so many items.
So I wanted to go through them again with fresh eyes, now that I’ve kind of developed my decluttering muscle a bit more.
While doing so, I realistically asked myself if I was ever going to wear these, if I liked how they looked on me these days, or if I had worn them recently.
Otherwise, they had to go.
And honestly, I counted and I got rid of over 100 pieces of clothing.
That’s insane!
And you would think, ‘Oh, now your wardrobe must look pretty bare.’
But it actually doesn’t. There’s still plenty of stuff in there, lots of items I can still wear.
Do you know how they say you wear 20% of the items that you have for 80% of the time?
That was true for me.
Now I think I’m getting close to having just that 20% or even less. But before, it was just insane in my wardrobe.
9. The kitchen
Then I went into the kitchen and I got rid of about 5 items in there.
First of all, I got rid of a tea canister.
We use the coffee and sugar ones; as for the tea, I have them displayed in their boxes. So the canister was useless, it had to go.
I also got rid of this sandwich toaster, which had been barely used. And a few random small bits.
10. Toys in outbox
The next to tackle was a black bin bag full of toys that I’d put in the “outbox”.
Every once in a while, I would go through my son’s toys and think about what toys he hasn’t played with or even touched in a while.
I would just take them out of his toy baskets and put them in an “outbox”, which is just a place where I put things that need to leave our home.
So I have been gathering all of these toys for a while now, and there were over 100 of them in there, like little knickknacks, or random puzzle pieces.
All of them had to go.
11. Books
I had to go through books too and decide if I was gonna read this book again or not.
Sometimes you read a book and you think, “Oh, that was really good,” and you feel like you need to keep it to read it again, go through it, or just show it to friends when they come over.
But if I’m not going to read it again, it’s not a keeper for me.
And if I do decide to read it again at some point in the future, I can always borrow it from the library or buy it second-hand.
We also had many children’s books that we’ve read and my son wasn’t interested in them anymore.
Some of them were duplicates, others were heavy or large, taking up too much space.
There’s no point in keeping that many. So we said goodbye to around 15 books or more.
My son still has quite a few to pick from when we read to him at bedtime.
I also got rid of my cookbooks, because even though I did like having them around and sometimes browsing through them, I rarely cooked anything from them.
The recipes in the cookbooks I had sometimes required ingredients I wouldn’t have or that would take a lot of effort.
And I’m all about simple meals these days.
What did I do with all these books?
I found ziffit.com to be very useful in getting rid of books quickly, getting them out of the house, and even making a little something as well.
How it works is that you download their app, open it, and scan the barcode of each book you’re getting rid of.
Then you pack all the books in a box and schedule a collection or just leave it outside on your porch, and then somebody will come and collect it.
It’s this easy, plus you get a bit of money from them: for example, for these 15 books, we got £12, which has more value than keeping that clutter in my home.
So this is it, 600 items out of our home!
I still can’t believe we got rid of 600 items even after I’ve decluttered for months and months, but I still find items that I can get rid of.
I hope you found this helpful. Keep on decluttering if you’re on this journey with me.
