Cleaning Tips for Hoarders

For the most part, we all have some amount of clutter somewhere in our life.

Maybe it’s in your car, home, office space, or even a little bit in each place, which is a normal part of life.

When it comes to hoarding, though, that’s an entirely different ball game. That’s a situation where clutter is taken to the 1000^th degree!

While there is a psychological component to hoarding and how that happens, we aren’t delving into that. We’ll leave that to the professionals in that space.

In this article we’ll be focusing on the cleaning process and sharing four cleaning tips for hoarders to help get your space back to being organized.

1. Only Handle an Object One Time

You might tend to pick an item up and put it aside “for now” as you’re cleaning, but we want to encourage you to fight this urge.

As you’re sorting through your things, make a mental note to handle an item only ONCE!

Now, you might be wondering why this is important. Well, if you place something off to the side and plan on coming back to it later, you could do one of two things: talk yourself out of getting rid of it, or you could forget about it entirely.

Have boxes labeled: keep, trash, and sell or donate at your disposal so that you don’t have to think about it twice.

Then as you’re going through everything, place the different things in the appropriate box.

2. Draw Out A Plan

Trying to decide where to start cleaning in a super cluttered house can easily overwhelm you, so start by drawing out a game plan.

We recommend working in incremental steps so that nothing feels like it’s too much.

For instance, start with the bedrooms, move to the bathrooms, and end with the common areas like the living room and kitchen.

If you’re feeling stressed, take a step back and start even smaller, with something like the clothes or cleaning the dishes.

3. Put Unsure Items into a Box

There might be an item that you can’t decide whether or not to keep.

For such items that you can’t determine what to do with, have a separate box to store them.

Once finished, put the box off to the side and keep for only SIX MONTHS.

During that time, if you never retrieved an item(s) from that box, you know that you don’t need them and can let it go.

If you do use an item, pull it out, and get rid of anything you didn’t use.

4. Donate, Donate, Donate

Not everything is meant to be thrown away or recycled – you can sometimes easily find a new home for things that you no longer want or need.

For example, the items that you didn’t use during the six-month test are items that you could donate.

We understand, it can be hard to get rid of things, but if you haven’t used them, allow them to find a new home somewhere else where the owners will enjoy and cherish them.