Advice on my total home reset

[Seriouslyoverit]

We are attempting to spend the next week getting our very out of control house back to a normal level of calm and clean ready for the next school year

Am here looking for tips and support as I find it pretty overwhelming and DH and I see the chaos differently so I am trying to be the one with a realistic plan that means I can see a visible improvement by next weekend and then maintain it!

We have three main goals -

1. reorganise teen DS bedroom and ideally get a new Ikea wardrobe for it ( hard to keep tidy now as current wardrobe too small )
2. revamp what was their playroom but has become a dumping ground and has many old toys still in it which need to be ruthlessly culled.
3. spare bedroom is a total disaster zone and piled high with all the things we haven’t tackled along the way - we could probably spend a few days in this room alone.

We have a skip and scoped out a charity shop that is easy to drop things off at so in theory we are all set!

have no clue where to start though and today is also at risk of being hijacked by some social obligations .

if anyone can give me some tips and cheerleading I would be seriously grateful we really need to do this !

I would suggest

• prioritise - which of these is most important
• break it all down into much smaller tasks and organise the tasks into a doable order (eg you’re going to have to coordinate getting all the stuff out of dcs wardrobe, getting rid of the wardrobe, getting the new wardrobe and putting it up)
• be very realistic about how long everything is going to take
• and MOST IMPORTANT STOP adding to the problem - what habits have led you to having two rooms that are dumping grounds? Why don’t you deal with stuff as you go along? Can you change that habit?

I'd start with a quick go over all the spaces to identify things to get rid of - anything broken, with bits missing, too dog eared to sell, stained. Be ruthless. Maybe get the kids involved and give them a challenge. Who can find 50 things to get rid of? Great, now can you find 60 things?

That first pass should make it easier to go over things a second , third or more times to refine what you're keeping. It will also give everyone a boost to see the skip filling up and the piles of stuff going down.

Build in some breaks to give everyone a focus - four bags and we can have a hot chocolate, ten bags and we can have lunch. If it feels like it's going to last all day the enthusiasm will dwindle.

One tip that really helped us during our last big reset: tackle the spare bedroom first, even though it's the worst. Once it's cleared enough, use it as your staging area - pile everything from the other rooms in there to sort into keep/donate/skip without creating new mess in the rooms you're trying to fix. It becomes a one-way flow rather than chaos spreading everywhere.

Also +1 to the one in, one out rule once you're done - stops the dumping grounds coming back. You've got this!

Thanks so much for the tips everyone , annoyingly I ended up achieving almost nothing today as I wasn’t feeling well. So tomorrow we will start again with your advice on board!

Does Anglo collections collect from your area? If so, I would use them then you have to have stuff ready and cleared!

I have been ill again today so it’s very frustrating - we did manage a charity run with a bootful so not a write off but only a small dent made so need to hope tomorrow I am back to having some energy so we can have more impact . We have definitely over estimated how quickly we could work through it all and I need to make sure we aren’t in full chaos when the kids go back to school. I am trying to be positive that at least we have started and any progress is better than none but I also wish I could wave a magic wand and be on the other side of it !