How To Declutter Before You Move

If you’re dreaming of a smooth move in the coming year, we can help. While you might be tempted to just throw all your stuff in boxes and sort it out when you get to your new place, that’s just a recipe for confusion, mayhem, and a really prolonged unpacking process. The secret to a smooth, seamless move, and a swift unpacking? Organize and declutter first! Before you even start thinking about putting things in boxes or breaking out the duct tape, it’s time to do some serious decluttering. If your home is organized, it’s a lot easier to pack in a way that makes sense and is easy to unpack in your new place.

Here are some of our favorite tips for decluttering and organizing before you move:

Toss the Trash

We all hold onto stuff we don’t need. Whether it’s clothes that no longer fit, empty takeout containers, or just a pile of knick-knacks that don’t go with the rest of your décor, sometimes it’s just really important to take a good long look at all the stuff on your kitchen counter and break out the trash bags. A good way to force the trash to go out is to open up a big trash bag and just walk through your home gathering debris. You can’t stop until it’s full! You may find more garbage than you thought.

Only Useful Items—Yes, Really

After the garbage purge, evaluate what’s left. Maybe it doesn’t look like trash to the naked eye, but it will if you think about it long enough… Look at each item, and if you cannot name a use for it immediately, it might be time to get rid of it. This will help you determine what you should keep and what might need to go to the nearest Goodwill. Got a birdcage but no birds? Out it goes. The plastic dollhouse that none of the kids play with anymore? Gone, gone, gone. Decorative post-modern clay sculpture that your great-aunt’s ex-boyfriend gave you for Christmas ten years ago? Time to say goodbye.

Give It A Home

For those items that are useful and you definitely want to keep, it’s time to determine what their optimal destination will be. You might love those rain boots, but the middle of the kitchen floor isn’t the place for them to go—and they definitely shouldn’t get packed with the kitchen utensils. Give those beloved boots a home in the mud room or the closet, and make sure they get packed where they need to live. Then, when you get to your new place, everything will already be in the place where it needs to be.

Long Time No Touchy

Real talk: You might love that yellow dress with the cats on it, but when was the last time you wore it? As a last round of purging before you start packing, lessen the amount of stuff you have to move by thinking about when the last time you touched an item was. If it’s useful theoretically, but not in practice, you’ll do yourself a favor by rehoming it.

If you’re planning a move soon, it might be time to get started on that spring cleaning a little early this year. And when you’re ready to break out the boxes and load up the truck, don’t hesitate to give Capital Movers a call.