7 Ways to Declutter Your House in 15 Minutes a Day (And Waste Less Too!)

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Clutter, garbage, waste it can easily take over your house! You walk in and see the clutter and stress starts to tense up your body. You can’t find anything and sometimes you do a clean sweep just to get it out of sight! It’s easier to do that than to figure out a way to declutter your home and waste less at the same time! I know we’ve done it, but honestly we feel awful after it because how much waste our family of five produces is crazy!

That’s why we were stoked to try #wasteless challenge for  a week, we figured we would not only reduce our carbon footprint by the amount of waste we produce, but we would also take the time to declutter our house so we would produce less waste permanently.

The week before the challenge, I wanted to see how much garbage we were produce. From the clutter that is in our house, it didn’t surprise me that for a little ole family of five we produced about a bag of garbage a day, and a bin of recycling every other day.  This was kind of eye opening. We’ve been trying to shop less to bring less items in our home, but we still manage to produce a ton of waste! It was really eye opening, but at least now I knew by decluttering the house, and a few other tricks, we could definitely waste less and get the chaos out of our home.

Before we get to the tips, we made sure to print out this great decluttering printable. It will help you declutter your home room by room. Each day spend your 15 minutes on a different room, and pair it up with the waste less tips we are going to share and your home will be decluttered in no time, plus you will waste less as a family too! (Talk about a win/win)

Ready to get started? Check out these 7 ways to declutter your home in 15 minutes a day, and we will share with you how it helped us reduce the waste in our house too! The results were amazing!

 

7 Ways to Declutter Your Home in 15 Minutes a Day

Sort Mail as it Comes In: Every day, we sort our mail as it comes in the house. That includes putting the junk mail in the recycling bin. It has really helped reduce all the mail clutter! You can also stop junk mail here but opting out of receiving junk mail so you reduce the waste and clutter before it even gets to your mailbox.

Sell it, And Go Digital: One of our favorite ways to declutter and reduce the garbage we produce is to buy things digitially. We take 10 minutes a day to go room to room looking for games, DVDs, and books that we have physical copies of. Then we head to Half Price Books or Gamestop to sell our games and buy digital copies. They take up less room, and they don’t produce any waste because there is no packaging for a digital copy!

Bathroom Essentials: The bathroom is a place that you can waste a lot of space and produce more garbage than you think. Rather than having twenty beauty products, get back to the essentials. The husband and I each have on basket for our personal care items. We have the minimum of what we need, and the rest we have sold, donated, or discarded.

Make a Home for Everything: I’m always telling my kids that everything needs a home. If it doesn’t have a home, we need to find one or see if we really need the item. It can be daunting to do this for every room, but do it 15 minutes a day, every day and soon enough you will have less clutter all over the house.

Pass it on: Hand me downs have probably saved my children’s lives. (ok not that dramatic, but you get the drift) We’ve reduced our waste for years by being the happy recipients of hand me downs. It has saved us money, and saved some waste because we aren’t buying brand new clothes. Though, keeping hand me downs can add to the clutter if you let it. We have always had a storage bin for the clothes. Every season we see what each child has outgrown, and if we have a young child that will eventually fit into it we place it in the bin. If not, we donate it or sell it at a  yard sale.

Buy Less: One sure fire way to keep clutter at bay is to stop adding to it. The more you buy, the more that you have to find a place for. When we shop we try to find things that we can’t live without, and we are honest with ourselves about that. Plus, if one thing comes into the house another must find another home. It helps keep things in check.

Take it Slow: It didn’t take a day for your house to become a clutter mess, don’t expect to fix it in a day. Take one room 15 minutes a day until that room is done, and then move onto the next room. It makes it more manageable, and you can spend more time making sure you aren’t producing a ton of waste while decluttering as well.

Now that you have the tips to help you declutter, get on it! We pulled the whole family together for the Tom’s of Maine waste less challenge. We didn’t just want to get rid of clutter, but we wanted to reduce how much garbage that we were producing while we did it. Plus, we wanted to find ways to keep the waste and clutter out of our house so we could make a more permanent change for the better.

Each day we spent 15 minutes a day decluttering our house and getting ready for our fall yard sale. On top of that we made sure to recycle each and everything that we could recycle. That way we at least knew less was going into the landfill!

We also took the time to pay attention to how much we were buying each week. Mainly we only do food shopping, but even with just doing that kind of shopping we were producing a ton of waste. Most of it was from all the packaging from the food that we bought. We made the goal to reduce our waste by at least two bags of trash a week, and after the first day we really started to realize just how much of our recycling and waste basket filled up with food packaging.

Finding this, we made two simple changes to our lives for the week. First we bought bigger food, but less packaging. Instead of buying individual yogurts, we bought the bigger tubs of yogurt. We also made sure to recycle each and every single thing that is recyclable. Normally we do about a 60% job recycling. This week we made sure to recycle 100%. You have any guess at what are results were? We were able to hit our goal of reducing 2 bags of trash a week, and our recycling amount didn’t go up a whole lot which means less waste!

Being more environmentally conscious is a passion of our family, and it was so much fun to work with Tom’s of Maine to see how we could make a difference by reducing our waste and decluttering our house at the same time! Tom’s of Maine is an amazing brand that is passionate about the environment, their products, giving consumer’s a choice, and standing behind their beliefs 100%! Plus, they put their money where their mouth is! They are doing more by even trying to reduce the waste their factory makes! Check out the Tom’s of Maine Goodness report here to see how their efforts are going!

What about you? Are you ready to take the Waste Less Challenge? How much waste do you think you could reduce in your house? Take the 7 day challenge, and share your results with the  Quirky Inspired community!

Ready to really start cleaning? Check out these Green Spring Cleaning tips!

Want more inspiration? Check out these other great posts on Quirky Inspired