DIY “Sort your life out”?

[DeclutteringNewbie]

“Stuff” has taken over our home. Have been watching Sort your life out (the Stacey Solomon show) with DH and DC, who are keen to do something like this.

Probably not feasible to hire a warehouse and removals but wondering if anyone has successfully broken it down into a workable DIY approach? Not sure whether to do it room
by room or item type (eg clothes, toys, bedding etc). Where to do it etc. I feel like once stuff is laid out it will be easy to sort, but the practicality of the clear space needed to look at stuff is challenging me. We have a decent sized living room so I guess we could move furniture out of the way and use that?

Grateful for any ideas/experiences.

The great thing about SYLO is finding everything from a category and putting them all together. Something a lot of us struggle with and challenging to manage in your home. For be that would only be feasible with the big team to help.

I think your next steps depend on what you know about how you work and what you can actually achieve during a session.

Personally, I get far too overwhelmed by the 'gather everything together in a big pile and go through it' method. I end up doing a little, then shoving everything back badly.

I really like Dana K White (www.aslobcomesclean.com/) no mess decluttering method and actually bought her book - Decluttering at the Speed of Life. It's a more gradual approach, with smaller steps to decluttering and much more incremental job satisfaction. The best thing is there is no giant pile that I have to figure out what to do with when I've reached me time/energy limits. Here's a video that demonstrates

The best thing to do is start. No matter how small the start, the results are so rewarding.

And take a little time to try a few methods and see what will realistically work for you and your family.

Good luck

I Marie condo-ed the whole house with kids. It worked brilliantly. We had approximately 8732 toys and got it down to about 30. Which is still too many.
I did it drawer by drawer or area by area. We got rid of 8 big car loads of shit to charity shops and 10 to the tip (mainly from the shed of doom) we have missed nothing.
We stopped buying shit for Xmas and birthdays and do things like concerts or days out instead.

We don’t have any spare beds, unfortunately. Previous attempts have resulted in panic at bedtime and waking up to a pile of stuff in the morning and feeling like a failure.

My DD has ADHD and struggled with feelings of failure. Hence I thought borrowing clothes rails and moving them to the living room would improve odds of success as we won’t want them in there for more than a day or 3!

We’re very time poor and no spare rooms and so need to be able to do it in chunks without rendering bits of the house unusable.

How much time do you have to dedicate to this?

Sort your life out takes at least 2 weeks and several massive teams of people plus a huge space.

I would hire a skip, book an angelo or similiar collection for stuff which can go to charity. Start in a room you can relax in so you have a safe haven and then work your way around the house. One room at a time, left to right around the room.

Do you have a garden? Could you do it room by room and lay it all out there?

I don't think keeping everything in the rooms and doing it will have the same effect. You can stop when you're bored and you won't be as ruthless. If all your possessions are in your garden you will HAVE to bring them back in or bin them.

I think removing them.in the first place is the key to this. It it was that easy to just chuck stuff away in situ nobody would be in this situation!

Or if you follow Dilly from sort your life out I think she sort of does reminders to like chuck out 10 pairs of unused socks today etc etc could you do it very gently and gradually?

Definitely do not pull everything out all go through it that way - far too much mess, overwhelming and you can't stop to do other stuff.

I really recommend Dana K White on YouTube or podcast as she advocates a much more manageable approach that won't have you wishing you'd never started!

Then if you’re time poor ‘sort your life out’ isn’t going to work. You need to dedicate a set amount of time a day, 15 to 30 mins. Either give up TV or something else or get up early and do a little bit everyday. Don’t aim for perfect, just for a bit less stuff.

You can also hire Dillys dollies if you have £££ to spare for this. I think they come and just do it for you!

I know it so tempting to want to do it in one fell swoop like on SYLO but it’s just not realistic for most of us.

You really need to break it down into chunks.

And remember that even if you just get rid of one thing at a time it’s a help. Everything that goes out if the house helps. So even doing one drawer gets you towards the end.

Dana K White is 100% your answer here. I put on one of her podcasts and declutter/sort while I listen. She’s very sensible rather than trendy!

I would work on and cupboards and drawers and shelves in the living room / kitchen / dining room first so you are freeing up storage space

Take one drawer, empty out, if it needs to be relocated somewhere else it can go in a basket to the right place. You and dh do a drawer each simultaneously and you can then move stuff around drawers.

One day do DCs clothes, lay it all out and decide what fits, is stained, isn't "them" etc. Then same for you and then DH does his.
That will hopefully make space in cupboards and drawers.

Then any other drawers or storage upstairs.

Then Room of Doom.

Take one or two boxes down, sort and tidy. Bin or charity. Into a basket to the right place if needs to be somewhere else.

Go around the house randomly and do an ad hoc basket.

Then back round. Sometimes you gotta circle back to see stuff you've missed, that's built up subsequently

Bits of days here and there.

The tip and several charity shops are within 2 miles so could use one car boot for rubbish and another for charity stop stuff and then drop those of within a couple of days.

I can’t (and won’t) do it all. Need DH and DC doing their share. It will take time but as long as there are chunks of time dedicated to it and we are making progress, that will be fine.

I would like some of the shock factor of SYLO in terms of the visual of so many cuddly toys, books, shoes etc which is hard to achieve unless you put them in the garden (and there is always a risk of rain here). Hence the living room idea.

That was my thinking.

I’ll check her out. Thank you.

dont think you’ll ebay etc. you won’t.

Yep. Unless you're already an active seller on ebay (and tbh you're probably not, or you wouldn't have built up so much stuff in the first place) there's basically 0 chance you'll start doing it as a result of something like this.

It needs to be a hyper focus for the decent chunks of time we have. I already don’t watch TV unless I’m doing something else eg ironing labels on school uniform or eating dinner. I’m studying at the moment so that takes a fair bit of “free” time. Both DH and I have demanding jobs with regular travel and the DC have activities some evenings a week and at weekends. They aren’t old enough to get themselves there and back at the moment as there is no local public transport.

I was thinking that allocating chunks of time to it and using some of the SYLO techniques of categorising things and needing to get it complete within the timeframe available would be manageable.

eg a whole day would mean we could probably sort all of our clothes out. 2-3 hours could be shoes and books or bedding and soft toys.

<eyes the 12 pairs of shoes stacked up in the corner awaiting ebaying>

I did list some clothes on a Facebook group a fortnight ago and some have sold so that’s quite motivating.

The doom boxes and bags are in almost every room, I think. There isn’t one dumping ground but any empty corner is likely to get a pile of boxes put in it to deal with later.

(with time blindness and low dopamine “later” doesn’t come when it comes to housework. Which is why I need there to be something exciting to happen for all of us as a result of early efforts to motivate it continuing)

Actually I sold tons of my late husband's stuff on ebay. Lots of it was worth quite a lot. It was stuff that other mad blokes, I mean collectors, would spend real money on. It meant I could have a new kitchen, bathroom and shower room. You do have to put the effort in, but, to me it was worthwhile. I sold lots of his books to specialist book sellers, because, again, they were the sort that were of interest to collectors. And his vinyl records went to another specialist shop.

I’ve actually made nearly £1,500 since last year selling clothes on vinted. I get a bit bored but have been slowly doing a huge cull too, alongside kids, work etc

https://www.thehappybookcompany.co.uk/product-page/from-chaos-to-calm-with-declutter-dollies

I bought Dilly’s book and try to do a task a day where I can.

I set up a charity pile, a sell pile (try and upload 5 items a day to vinted) other stuff goes straight in the bin/recycling. Books/cds etc you can scan and send off to music magpie

Also I do 15 minutes timed in rooms just to try and keep on top of them, makes it more like a game.

it’s been hugely cathartic and I’ve had to do it over time. I’m also really mindful of what I bring into the house, and have changed spending habits.

Just saw your update, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Also why don’t you just apply to be on the show? They’re always looking for new families and I think they are always kind and mindful of people’s feelings.

Thank you for this.

There are 4 of us needing to do this. It can’t all be down to me. (Nor should it.)

DH has begged me not to.