How I Decluttered Our Problem Area- For Good!

What’s inside: the strategy that helped me declutter our problem area in our home- and why it might work for you, too!

I never wanted a two-story house.  An open concept ranch? That was my dream.  I hated the inconvenience of stairs and how clutter seemed to always collect on them.  So, when Ryan & I bought our first house together, what did we settle on?  A two-story. With a galley kitchen. Two things I despised. The wooded back yard with a creek won us over.  We loved the location and the tranquil, dead-end street.  House hunting is all about trade-offs, right?  Well, unless you’re independently wealthy or willing to spend whatever it takes to tick all the boxes off on your dream home.  For us, buying a foreclosure and fixing it up was the most economical way to get what we were looking for.  So, we settled in.  And so did the clutter.  Stuff on the stairs became a chronic, unavoidable issue.

My failed attempts at decluttering

For years stuff collected on those stairs.

We tried changing our habits: “Okay, every time you go up the stairs, just take something up with you and put it away.” FAIL.  Somehow we’d never see the stuff sitting there as we journeyed upward. Or maybe we were disinterested in putting it away at that moment.  It was one of those.

I tried implementing a system: “Okay, I placed this basket/bag/bin at the bottom of the stairs.  When something needs to go upstairs, just put it in there.  When it’s full, we’ll take it up and put it away.”  FAIL.  Said container sat for so long, I thought I lost my favorite earrings from Hawaii.  Turns out they were just hanging in that gorgeous coral bag on the newel post. For months. Maybe years.  I lost track.

Regardless of the strategy, I couldn’t manage to declutter our problem area.

If you’re ready to start decluttering, but you’re not sure where to start, I have the solution!  Learn how emptying a space before decluttering will become your secret weapon in your war against stuff! Snag the FREE, Empty a Space Decluttering Guide and learn how this one strategy will transform your home & your life! It’s worked for our home & I’m confident it will work for you, too!

 

The problem with my decluttering solutions

The problem with my solutions was that simply relying on a change of habit to permanently declutter a difficult area wasn’t working.  Continuing to push strategies that relied on changing behaviors wasn’t going to be enough.  That’s not to say that the strategies I tried weren’t good strategies.  They are perfectly good tips to try that will work for some people or some situations.  They just weren’t the right solutions for this particular problem for us.

Now, I’d like to tell you I had some organizational epiphany that changed my life and the problem with my stairs, but it didn’t happen like that.  As a matter of fact, the problem went away on its own.  It was only after the fact that I realized it had been solved.  One day I realized stuff wasn’t gathering on our stairs anymore.  Without any intentional effort to specifically solve the problem, it was no longer an issue.  It happened so subtly, I couldn’t even pinpoint when it occurred.  I just realized I hadn’t cleaned off the stairs in a while.  I needed to figure out what changed.

 

How I (inadvertently) decluttered our problem area

Upon reflection, there were two changes I could identify that impacted our stairway clutter: changing up our storage and general decluttering.

We lacked quality storage

One of the main problems we realized after moving in was that there wasn’t any quality storage on the main floor.  A single closet at the foot of the stairs made up the bulk of our storage (aside from a small number of kitchen cabinets and a rotting bathroom vanity).  As a result of no storage, we ended up with a lot of items being stored upstairs.

It made sense to me at the time- if there’s no room to store something on the main level, store it upstairs where there are more options.  This will keep the main level less cluttered and everything will have a home (that’s the #1 organizational mantra after all, right?!?!)

However, this decision was perhaps the biggest cause of our clutter.  We had to constantly bring items downstairs to use that would then need to be returned.  My cookbooks were stored up in the office.  All our clothing and jackets were stored upstairs.  All our shoes were stored in the master closet. Camera equipment, miscellaneous junk drawer items, office supplies.  You name it, it was likely stored upstairs. I blame this on Marie Kondo.

The Kondo conundrum

Marie Kondo, the famed Japanese decluttering guru, and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, suggests storing like items in one area so that you know where to find & return them.  I liked this idea. It made sense to me when I read it.  If my husband and I knew the home of each item, surely it would be easy to keep items together and organized.  The problem though, was that Marie Kondo underestimated our loathing for traversing stairs.

You don’t have to live your life overwhelmed with stuff! Grab the FREE Empty a Space Decluttering Guide.  This guide walks you through the decluttering process, step-by-step, for any room in your home. No matter how much stuff you currently have, if you follow this guide, you will have a beautiful, simplified space as a result!

 

Decluttering our problem area by repurposing storage

Call it laziness, busyness, or just plain old apathy, but messy stairs weren’t motivating enough to make a change.  Plus, it was super inconvenient to house all of our books up in the office when I used the cookbooks in the kitchen.  We stored all office supplies upstairs, but I often needed a pen and paper in the kitchen while making calls or sending mail.

I still think her idea would work for some people {like those blessed to live in an open concept ranch} but it didn’t work for our home.  Ironically, when I began to rethink the way I stored items, something magical DID happen..by complete accident!

I needed a better way to store our boys’ belongings in their play area.  I liked the idea of keeping them organized in bins and easily accessible shelves, but spending money on storage wasn’t an option.  I decided to bring down our Ikea Kallax Shelf Unit from our office and place it in the front room.  However, since we had already decluttered the kids’ toys, we didn’t need to utilize the entire unit.

With extra space available, I began thinking about the things I stored upstairs that we used regularly.  By keeping them in the living room instead of upstairs, we’d no longer have to go up and down the stairs to retrieve them.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this decision played the biggest role in helping us declutter our problem area.

I decluttered A LOT!

Somewhere between purging 2,018 items in 2018 and around 600 items out for 2019, stuff piling on the stairs stopped being an issue.  While the tossing of item #1,017 or #846 was not the least bit memorable, all those items out added up!  There was just less stuff in our house in general, which meant less stuff traveling between floors and landing on the stairs.

And while my journey to declutter our home is not over, I can honestly say that the #decluttertheyear challenge I gave myself in 2018 was a pivotal moment along the path.

I decluttered the closet at the foot of the stairs.  I reduced my cleaning supplies down to just a few items (pretty much everything I use to clean our home boils down to Norwex cloths and Young Living Thieves Cleaner).  Expired pet supplies were tossed.  Summer camping chairs were moved to the basement. For our Christmas present to each other, we upgraded to a cordless vacuum that now hangs in the wall instead of taking up space in the closet (Y’all, I don’t’ even care that this makes us sound like old farts. This thing is worth the hype. It’s the only way I keep the floors clean with these babies!).   As a result of an almost empty hall closet, I was able to utilize it for our regularly used jackets, sweaters, and bags.   No more hanging them on the newel post.

Sometimes when you are on a mission to declutter, you don’t realize how one decision will impact another.  When I decluttered our office, I discarded so many items that we no longer needed the entire shelving unit to store office goods.  I reduced items down from 16 cubbies to about 4, a 75% reduction.

With the reduced amount of items needing to be stored, I was able to move them into the office closet, thus eliminating the need for the shelving unit altogether.  Since the unit no longer served a purpose in the room, I began thinking about what else we could use it for.  That’s when I came up with the idea of moving it downstairs for additional storage, and the rest is history.

 

Declutter your problem area

Sometimes decluttering a problem area isn’t as challenging as it seems.  Sometimes the solutions are right under our nose.  If I would have spent time analyzing what items were consistently on our stairs, and what storage adjustments I could have made, I probably would have lived in a home with spotless stairs years ago.  I would have realized the problem wasn’t a matter of willpower or habit, but of creating a system that worked.

Perhaps adding some storage and minimizing your possessions will work to help you declutter your problem area, too!  Maybe it will take trying a few strategies and systems to find what works for you.  The biggest thing is to just not give up.  Don’t resign yourself to the belief that your house is just always going to be a wreck. Or that the stairs will always have stuff on them until you achieve your dream of an open concept ranch.  You can make changes.  Your home can be the peaceful haven you envision in your wildest dreams.

Need some help simplifying your home so it becomes a place you love?  Don’t forget to download your FREE copy of the Empty a Space Decluttering Guide! This 7-page guide walks you through the decluttering process step-by-step, transforming even the most stuffed spaces into tranquil places!