30 Day Declutter Challenge | How to Declutter + Organize Your Home

Overwhelmed by the chaos of your home? Feeling like there’s stuff everywhere? Then this 30 Day Declutter Challenge is for you!

One thing I absolutely love doing is sharing how to declutter and organize your home. Decluttering and organizing helps in so many ways! It helps your home stay more clean, you spend less time trying to find things and you to not fill your home with things you don’t need, want or use.

I find cleaning or organizing to be super therapeutic but I know that’s not the case for everyone! It can be stressful, confusing and down right overwhelming.

Why am I doing this 30 day declutter challenge?

I believe that a home that is organized and clutter free is a more joyful space. I’m a mom with kids. When I started this my days are full of changing diapers, feeding babies and now they’re full of dropping off and picking kids up from school and preparing all the meals for the day. The last thing I want is to spend hours picking up our home after the kids go to sleep.

I want ,u homes to be less stressful and more purposeful. Being organized and removing the clutter helps do this! When you start your mornings off knowing exactly where that specific hair product you like is located and your kids know where to find their hats and mittens to get ready for school, it creates a place where there’s less overwhelm, less chaos and more calm.

I know how crazy and stressful life can be, especially with kids, and the purpose of this 30 day declutter challenge is to eliminate some of that!

I’m going to be sharing a day by day calendar to guide you through this process. You can follow it directly or just simply use it as a starting point to help get you going (or re-motivate you) through this challenge.

Below you’ll see the printable to use for this challenge. You can print it off to help you prep for the challenge! Download it here…

I’ll be going more in depth to many of the areas with the best way to go through each space in your home but this will give you a basic idea of what to expect.

How to Declutter + Organize Your Home

Let’s walk through some key things you’ll need to know when you start your 30 day declutter challenge.

Categorizing your stuff

First up, as you go through all of your items you’ll want to categorize everything. You’ll want to categorize your stuff in 4 different ways:

1. Keep
2. Donate/Sell
3. Fix
4. Throw away

Keep

The items you keep should be ones that you have used within the last year or have sentimental value that your grandkids would appreciate (for example your wedding dress).

Things like “aspirational clothing” (clothing that you don’t fit into yet that you hope to someday), fine china that you haven’t used in your 5 years of marriage and sentimental items that really have little meaning to you should not be kept.

This is such a morbid thought but I always think to myself, if I die, would this add value to anyone else? If I’m keeping something because I think it would be a nice thing to pass on to my kids then it should have some meaning.

There’s always a few exceptions to this rule. If you’re pregnant or just had a baby there will be clothes that don’t fit that will likely eventually fit again. You don’t need to purge things like that!

Donate/Sell

Donating or selling items is by far the best thing to do with items you’re no longer keeping. I always let our babysitters and my niece get first dibs at my clothes and send photos of things I’m getting rid of to my sisters and mom to see if they want it.

From what doesn’t get claimed, gets either sold or donated in my neighborhood buy nothing group or to our local thrift store! If you’re selling clothes, check out this post with 11 places to sell your clothes.

When it comes to donating, check out your local thrift store first. There are lots of great places to donate items to and even some that pick up items (in MN you can even have some places pick up your items like Salvation Army or DAV). I schedule out donation pickups every other week during the challenge to help keep me motivated.

I sell some of my name brand clothes on Poshmark (find me @jen_biswas) and other items through our local neighborhood app.

Fix

When you put things in the “fix” category, set a time limit for yourself. If you have clothes that need to be altered set an appointment with your seamstress BEFORE this challenge ends. If you haven’t brought them in within 2 weeks they should go to the donate pile.

Same with everything else. Set a date the items need to be fixed by, set an alert in your phone, and if it’s not fixed by then, then donate them!

Throw Away

And lastly, items to throw away. This should be your last resort but things that can’t be donated or fixed (like old papers, broken items or etc) belong here.

30 Day Declutter Challenge

Ok, now on to the 30 Day Declutter Challenge! I have my printable broken out into 30 days of work with specific sections each day of the week. You can use this in a few ways. You can follow the plan exactly, you can do all the work on the weekends or however works best for you. Download the printable…

As you go through your home, cross off the completed areas on your print off. This will help you keep track of what you’ve done and what’s still left. There’s also something amazing about crossing things off a list!

I also have 3 additional documents. One is areas to clean and organize monthly. This will help you stay on top of things and declutter and organize throughout the year so January isn’t too exhausting or demanding.

I also have 2 bag trackers. If you want to keep track of how many bags of items you get rid of throughout the challenge, we have 2 options! One is by the day and one is a simple line by line tracker. Use one, both or none – whatever you want!

I have tons of blog posts related to many of the areas on the list. Below are all of them (and more to come). Bookmark this page so you can reference it throughout the challenge.

I’ll also be sharing links on Instagram so follow along there for an easy way to keep up to date on blog posts (new and old!).

Kitchen

• How to Organize Your Kitchen
• 7 Kitchen Pantry Organization Ideas
• Spice Storage Ideas
• 13 Kitchen Products to Get Organized
• 16 Genius Under the Sink Organizing Ideas

Closet

• How to Purge Clothes and Organize Them (Expert Tips!)
• 11 Places to Sell Your Clothes for Cash
• 6 Tips to Sell Your Clothes Online
• How to Organize Your Shoes

Bathroom + Linen Closet 

• Bathroom Organization
• Organizing Your Hair Products
• How To Organize Your Makeup Drawer
• How To Organize Your Linen Closet

Living Room, Storage Room + Garage

• Living Room Organization

Kids

• How to Organize Toys (& 12 Toy Storage Ideas)
• 7 Genius Ways to Organize Baby Clothes
• 25 Lego Organization Ideas

Misc 

• Entryway Drop Zone Organization
• 14 Simple Secrets to Keeping a Clean House
• 7 Genius Home Organization Hacks

Don’t forget to download and print off your calendar below!