What To Do After Decluttering: 5 Ways To Keep Your Home Organized

If you’ve been keeping up with my three-part decluttering series, congrats! Now that you’ve decluttered your space, let’s discuss what to do after decluttering to keep your home clean and organized moving forward.

If you’re just now joining the series, don’t forget to go back to Part 1 for your FREE decluttering checklist and Part 2 for tips on how to make decluttering fun. Then, meet me back here for five quick tips on how to keep your space free of clutter. Let’s jump in!

What To Do After Decluttering: 5 Tips To Stay Organized

1. Recognize That This Is An Everyday Task

Now that you’ve worked so hard to declutter your space, keeping it clean won’t be a one and done thing. You’ll have to work at it every day, so try to make a habit out of cleaning as you go. Here are a few examples:

• Stack dirty dishes in the dishwasher immediately after use
• Put dirty clothes into a hamper instead of on the floor
• Immediately throw away empty boxes and packing paper after you open a package
• Make a plan to sort mail as soon as you bring it in so it doesn’t pile up
• Have a designated space for shoes, coats, etc. so they don’t take up space
• Clean out your closet at the end of each season. Put out-of-season items into containers to keep them from taking up space

2. Be Intentional About Putting Things Away When You’re Done With Them

This sort of goes back to tip #1, except it involves making a lifestyle change. Once you develop a habit of putting things away whenever you’re done with them, it starts to feel less like a chore and more like second nature.

I like to think of it as doing your future-self a favor. In other words, I’m going to clear these dinner dishes tonight so my future-self will have a clean workspace tomorrow morning when it’s time to make breakfast for the babies.

I find that the biggest thing that throws me off my game is starting the day with a dirty kitchen. So, I created a nightly cleaning checklist for specific things to do to make my mornings easier. Yours may be different depending on how old your babies are, but hopefully this one will help!

3. Clean In Zones

I started doing this after I heard it on a podcast, and it has helped so much! With seven people in our household, it gets overwhelming really quickly trying to clean up after everyone. So, I try to clean in zones. Some things, like the kitchen, have to be done every day, but other things can be done weekly.

For example, Mondays are laundry days. Tuesdays are when I focus on deep cleaning all of the bathrooms. Wednesdays, I sweep and mop the downstairs, and so on. Think about the different areas in your home that you can dedicate 30 minutes to an hour to once or twice a week.

Breaking your space down into smaller zones will make it feel a lot less overwhelming and make you more likely to keep up your new cleaning regimen. Bonus: when you’re cleaning a specific area regularly, it’s also a lot less likely to get decluttered again!

4. To Keep Your Home Decluttered, Everything Needs A Place

We touched on this a bit back in Part 1, but here’s a quick reminder. If you find that you don’t have a space for a particular item, perhaps it’s time to figure out whether you really need it.

If you can’t find a space, it also might be a matter of needing storage. For a while, we always had open boxes of diapers in the living room and in our bedroom. Or, we would take the individual sleeves out, and the diapers would get everywhere.

We didn’t necessarily have a space for them, but, of course, that doesn’t mean we didn’t need them! So, I actually bought a large, but cheap storage basket to store the diapers in. Boom: problem solved!

Think about how you use the different areas in your home. Now that you’ve completed your decluttering session, it’s a great time to stock up on storage bins, baskets, etc. to keep everything organized and off the floor, couch, or wherever it usually ends up.

These are some of my faves for beautiful, affordable storage, but don’t let this break your bank! You can also check out local thrift and discount stores and maybe even your own home for inspiration! See if you can repurpose older containers lying around before you throw them out.

5. Think Critically About How You Use Your Space

This one is super important after decluttering your home. As you think about different areas in your home, try to think critically about whether or not the items in those areas actually belong in that specific space.

Here’s an example. For the longest, I had a cute little tray set up by our front door for keys, mail, etc. But the problem was, we barely ever used our front door. My husband and I always park in the garage, so we usually drop whatever we’re carrying on the bar in the kitchen.

The tray was going unused and the stuff we brought in was contributing to clutter in the kitchen and driving me nuts! So, I ended up getting a really cute wooden floating shelf with multiple hooks for keys and a slot to keep mail in. Problem solved!

Here’s another example. Back before we had the twins, my oldest three spent a lot of time in the living room with us. They were constantly bringing their toys in there, and then my husband and I would have to schlep everything back into the playroom. Or, we would end up tripping over it on a midnight run to the kitchen for water.

So, I ended up grabbing a few medium-sized baskets to keep on our shelves for the kids’ books and smaller toys. When they want to spend time with us in the living room, they know where their goodies are, and they know where everything goes once they’re finished playing with it.

Also, it’s a lot easier to just keep a few things in the living room so they don’t try to bring the larger toys in there every chance they get!

Are These Decluttering Tips Helpful?

So, those are my five easy-to-follow tips on what to do after decluttering! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as I enjoyed writing it!

I’m thinking of doing more mini-series topics going into the new year. So if you would like to see more content like this, do me a favor and drop me a comment below.

Happy decluttering!