The bedroom is the first place that I recommend decluttering, because I believe it will have the biggest impact on how you live and how you feel. After all, it is the first place you see when you get up in the morning, and it’s typically the place where most people get dressed and prepare for a brand-new day.
And you probably have way too many clothes and shoes in your bedroom closet, amIright? 🙂
The bedroom is also the last place you see before getting to sleep, so your bedroom should really be a nicely organized and peaceful area of your house to help you end your day on a high note.
7 Tips To Declutter Your Bedroom
A few years ago, we sold our house and moved to a new city and into an apartment. This was a big change, so we had to downsize and discard a lot of stuff. This also gave me the opportunity to finally declutter my bedroom to help make this move easier. Considering that I’m a bit of an organizer nerd, I’ve actually enjoyed the process very much and learned a few important lessons that I want to share with you here with 7 important tips:
1. Start Decluttering Your Bedroom with an Easy Win
There are several easy ways to start decluttering your bedroom & make it look better in just a few minutes. When tackling a big decluttering project, it’s important to get early wins to gain momentum and stay motivated… because there is lots to do! Here are a few quick tips to get started when you declutter your bedroom:
- Get a “re-organize” box and a “trash” box: Your bedroom most likely contains a lot of items that do not belong in there. That’s okay, but you don’t want to lose a lot of time by trying to find a new place for every single one of these items. Simply toss them in the “re-organize” box for later. A lot of items will also probably need to be discarded. Having a trash box with you will help expedite the process.
- Do a quick sweep: declutter the top of your bedroom furniture. Start by removing all items setting on top of your nightstand, or dresser. Use your “re-organize” and “trash” box as needed.
- Go through the messy drawers: do the same process, but this time with messy drawers – where you typically store a lot of accessories, magazines or books, and all kinds of random stuff! Messy drawers typically contain a lot of items to discard or re-organize somewhere else in the house.
- Put away dirty clothes: Put away any close laying around your bedroom and place them in your laundry basket.
- At the end of the process: Go through the “re-organize” box to return items to their proper places in your home.
2. Now Go for the Big Win: Your Wardrobe!
If you’re like most women, you probably have wayyyyy too many clothes in your bedroom (The average woman has 103 items in her closet!). To declutter your bedroom & your clothes, start by taking all your clothes out of the closet. And I mean everything. Put it all on your bed, or on the floor if you need to. If you’re going to declutter your bedroom, some clothes will have to go. Home organization expert Marie Kondo writes: “Make sure you have gathered every last piece of clothing… Are you sure there is not a single piece of closing left in the house?”.
If you’re like most women, you should have at least 70 items, and probably even over 100. Right there on your bed and on your floor. The good news is that getting rid of a few items won’t take very long, and it will be a big win to help simplify your life.
3. How to Declutter Your Clothes & Make the Tough Decisions
I get it. You spent a lot of money on clothes. Most of them still look pretty good. It would be a waste to discard them. And you probably have clothes that don’t quite fit or look right, that you almost never wear, but have kept in your house for years? Sounds a little too familiar? You’re not the only one.
So here is what can help: you can typically reduce the size of your wardrobe size pretty quickly, by as much as 20-30%, simply by asking yourself:
- If I was shopping for clothes right now, would I buy this item? If the answer is “no”, it is a signal that you should let it go.
- Does it fit? If not, let it go. Why keep something that doesn’t fit? It will only make you feel bad.
- Do I feel good in it? You want to feel confident in your clothes. Get rid of clothes that don’t make you feel & look good. They’re just getting in the way of the clothes you do want to wear.
- Did I wear it in the last season? It can be challenging to remove clothes that fit or make you look good, but that you just don’t wear for whatever reason. If you never put it on, you probably don’t need it. If you didn’t wear it last time, you most likely won’t reach for it this time.
If you want to learn more about decluttering your clothes, read my other article “How to declutter your clothes” in your bedroom.
4. Avoid the Lighly-Worn Clothes Mess – a.k.a. “The Chair”
What do you do with lightly-worn clothes in your bedroom? You know, the clothes that are not quite dirty enough to put in the laundry basket but not quite clean enough to go back in the closet. Do you pile them up on a chair?
A lot of people have a “chair” in their bedroom that no one can ever sit on because it’s covered by a mountain of lightly worn clothes. Sometimes, it is a pile of clothes on the floor. But don’t worry, you are not alone! The “chair” seems like a pratical solution at first but ends up being a constant source of clutter in most people’s bedrooms.
It’s a good idea to come up with a strategy for organizing your lightly worn clothes. We personally use a blanket rack (See the rack in our bedroom on the image below). The rack is not a beautiful or fancy decor item, but I think that our bedroom looks a lot nicer when clothes are nicely organized. It also keeps clothes from wrinkling so that you can wear them later & still look good.
By using a blanket rack and having regular “clear-off” times each week (where we put everything in the laundry or back in the closet), we’ve been able to get in control of this problem area. Plus, our room looks fairly tidy with this solution. Learn more here on How to Organize Worn Clothes.
5. Essential Products to Keep Your Bedroom Clutter-Free
Now that you’ve done most of the work to declutter your bedroom, you can think about how to organize it better. Don’t make the mistake to start there, because you first need to make some hard decisions about getting rid of some of your bedroom items and clothes before you think about organizing them.
Proper bedroom organization is often seriously neglected. It makes sense in a way. It’s not like you’re hosting dinner parties in your bedroom. But your bedroom can quickly become a dumping ground for a lot of items that don’t in there. A few organization products could turn out to be quite useful, am I right?
Examples of useful bedroom products to help keep your bedroom de-cluttered and organized include:
Plastic Drawers
Those are not the prettiest, but they’re practical and super helpful in your bedroom closet. We have used plastic sets of drawers for so many things over the years: craft supplies, tools, holiday decor, etc. They’ve come in handy in our bedroom as well! If you don’t have enough drawers, they are an inexpensive organization option.
Drawer Dividers & Organizers
Our current dresser has super small drawers, so I haven’t needed to use these yet but I’m using dividers and organizers in other parts of the house. If you’ve got a large dresser in your bedroom, these products can prevent your clothes from piling up into a huge jumped mess.
Learn more about other helpful bedroom organization products in my other post: 7 Must-Have Bedroom Organization Products – The (mostly) Simple Life
Bedroom Closet Systems
Are you ready for the next step?? If you are ready for an HGTV-ready bedroom closet and have a little bit of money available (this will cost you $600-$1,000 depending on the installation costs), you can look into bedroom closet systems such as this one below.
6. Re-Organize Your Bedroom Closet
I used to always enjoy snooping around in other people’s homes to see how they’ve used their spaces, so I’m inviting you into my bedroom closet. To be more precise, the bedroom closet from an apartment we lived in a few years ago, because I think it’s a nice example of using a small amount of space to organize a lot of different items. This closet used to hold our storage items, as well as our clothes. It’s not going to win any award for looking pretty and amazing, but it’s very organized and functional. Real life y’all!
If you’re looking to declutter your bedroom to increase storage space, maybe you’ll see an idea or two that could also work well for you. I apologize in advance because the pictures aren’t very good quality. It wasn’t a very bright area of the apartment, and the sun had been hiding for a few weeks, so it was hard to get good lighting.
Our nicer clothes are hanging up and our comfy clothes are on the shelf in the middle. We need to get to our clothes more often than anything else, so that’s what is easiest to access. Before we moved I bought a package of slim hangers that are velvety so nothing can slide off. I’m loving them! I’d like to get one more pack at some point so that all of our hanging clothes can be on them. 
Learn More About Decluttering Your Bedroom
Read these other popular articles on declutter your home and your bedroom:
