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So many boxes… So much clutter…

Use 5 Boxes to Sort and Organize Clutter

Do you still have boxes of stuff that never got unpacked when you moved? Or a place in your home that seems to accumulate all the clutter?

I am supposed to have a craft space in the basement, but it has become the cluttered catch-all area in my home instead. As you can see, it became the junk room and was wall to wall boxes, including some we never opened after moving in three years ago.

Before:

It has been a long-time goal of mine to get the house decluttered and organized, and this was the final space (not counting the garage).

So, as usual, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to get this done, and finally started chipping away at it.

How to sort through items in boxes

Now, there’s a lot of boxes, so I had to have a plan for what to do with anything that I found as I looked through them. To do this in a strategic manner, I collected 5 empty boxes/bags for sorting:

5 categories of sorting boxes

  • Put Away box – I am going to keep these items and I know exactly where I am going to put these items in the house.
  • Needs Action box – I am going to keep these items and I need to do something else with them before they are put away (bills, checks, broken items, find/clear a spot, etc)
  • Donation box – I am going to donate these items to charity, friends, or family.
  • Trash/Recycle bags – I no longer have a use for these items so I am going to throw away or recycle these items accordingly.
  • Re-sort box – I can’t decide what to do with these items at this time so I’m putting them in a box to sort through again later.

Here’s the progress I made after about a month.

Full Disclosure: When there were still about a third of the boxes left, I got impatient and moved the rest out into the movie area of the basement, and then moved craft supplies and partially complete DIY projects back into the space.

I’m so excited at the progress I’ve made using the tips I’ve learned from Messies Anonymous. Here’s the cleaned space. I still have a lot of boxes to sort through, but the progress is real and I know I can get it done in the next month or two.

Decluttering Bonus: Finding things you thought were lost forever

Bonus from decluttering is finding all the supplies I need to finish a t-shirt quilt that I started and never finished years ago. Second and best bonus is finding the partially finished t-shirt quilt that had been missing!

Now this project is back on my to do list and stands a real chance of being done this year! ?