How to Declutter Your Living Room - A Step by Step Guide

Decluttering Your Living Room – A Step by Step Guide

Learn how to declutter your living room. These simple tips and ideas will help make decluttering your living room easier.

Your living room is the one room in your home where your entire family can kick back and relax, read, watch television, listen to music, play video and other games and entertain friends and extended family members.

For that reason, it is extremely easy for your living room to become cluttered with both litter and useful and wanted items that belong in other areas of the home.

This can leave the room feeling and looking cluttered and disorganized.

However, decluttering your living room does not have to be difficult or time consuming if you follow these few simple steps.

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Easy Tips for Decluttering Your Living Room

Do General Pick up Every Day

You don’t need to wait until your living room is really cluttered before decluttering the room.

If you take a few minutes every evening to go through the living room to do a quick pick up and straighten up then the clutter won’t reach the point of becoming overwhelming.

Simply picking up toys left on the floor, placing games back into their place and those cups and glasses left on stands or the coffee table will help keep the clutter at bay,

Get Your Entire Family Involved

Get the whole family involved in decluttering the living room. The living room is a common space that often holds messes that belong to the entire family. Having everyone chip in with decluttering makes it easy to get the job done fast.

Set Up a System

After decluttering your living room, set up a system to deal with mail and other items that can be tossed into the recycling bin or trash right away so they do not need to be decluttered again later.

How to Declutter Your Living Room Step-by-Step

If you need to declutter your living room, here are a few simple steps that will make the task easier.

#1. Collect Items that Go in other Rooms in a Basket

Many items found in the living room belong to the kitchen or a bedroom and returning these to where they belong as you find them can lead to wasting a lot of time.

Grab a basket and put items that go in the kid’s room and other rooms in it. Then go from room to room putting the objects back in their proper place.

This will keep you from moving these things around to work around them.

And this makes picking up the clutter in the living room faster and saves you running back and forth from room to room putting items away.

#2. Clear off all Flat Surfaces

Begin by clearing off all of the flat surfaces in the room including the coffee table, stands, entertainment center and floors.

Flat surfaces are clutter hot spots that collect things that have no home, items people forgot, and general clutter that just doesn’t belong in your home anymore.

The living room contains a lot of these spaces like the coffee table, end tables, and bookshelves. Take the time to sort through old magazines, DVDs, and books to make room on your shelves.

Throw away any waste left lying around, and put away those books, games, and controllers.

#3. Declutter Old Décor

Clear away old decor. As much as we love adding pieces to our home that bring us joy, it is easy to find yourself with far too many pieces of decor that can be cleared out to make your space uncluttered and clean.

If you feel your living room is too cluttered, this is often a quick fix. Check bookshelves for excess decore items to remove some, allowing your shelves to feel more open and cutter-free.

#4. Sort and Declutter Electronic Cords and Accessories

Go through your electronic cords, remotes, and accessories. These can easily become a jumbled mess.

Label what every cord goes to and find any extra cords that may be wandering around from old devices.

Get rid of old remotes that do not go to anything and consider condensing down to a universal remote that would allow you to stash the rest away so you have less to clean each day.

#5. Check Out those Throw Pillows

Throw pillows can add comfort and color to your living room, but worn out pillows not only look bad, but can leave bits of debris all over your furniture and floor.

Take a few minutes to look at those throw pillows and get rid of those whose life span has come to an end.

In addition, if you have too many throw pillows they will only add to the clutter in the room. So limit those throw pillows to only those that add to the function of room not detract.

#6. Declutter and Organize Your Bookcase

Take the time to organize your bookcase. Throw away any ripped books or those with missing pages.

Give away any books that no one in your home is interested in, and arrange the rest of the books so they sit neatly in the bookcase arranging them either by author or by size.

#7. Declutter the Entryway

Clean out the coat closet and have kids clean out their backpacks.

When your entryway is in your living room there are often a lot of issues with clutter that comes in the door at the end of the day and doesn’t make its way to where it belongs.

Clearing this out and putting together a system that keeps this clutter from happening can help make cleaning your living room easier and keep clutter at bay.

#8. Clean Out Drawers One at a Time

More than likely, the drawers in your living room have all kinds of objects thrown into them. Take to cleaning out one drawer a week assigning specific spaces for paper clips, pens, pencils, etc.

If needed get drawer dividers in order to help keep items neatly in place.

Things to Declutter from Your Living Room – Decluttering Checklist

The living room tends to hold all of the odds and ends from your family’s everyday life. This can quickly turn the living room into a cluttered mess. Because of this, you will need to do more sorting than decluttering other rooms in your home.

Here you should make a point of decluttering items as you send items back to the rooms they belong. There is no point in sending items to the room they belong in only to have to declutter again.

Of course, your living room has plenty of things that rightfully belong there that need to be decluttered from time to time. Items to declutter from your living room may include:

Old decor items
Old throw pillows
Magazines
Books
Old mail
Toys
Pet toys
Crafting supplies
Unused tech gear

Tips to Organize after Decluttering Your Living Room and Keep Clutter at Bay

Once you have decluttered your living room you will find yourself with the task of preventing the problem from happening again.

To make the most of your decluttering session you want to take the time to get your living room organized.

Encourage Family Members to Pick Up Items after Use

Once your living room is decluttered encourage family members to pick up the items they use and put them away before going to bed for the night.

By teaching your family to help keep things put up, decluttering your living room in the future will be less time consuming.

Storage to Hide Clutter

Put together storage that allows you to hide your clutter that you can not get rid of or is waiting to go back where it belongs.

Have a Dedicated Place for Family Board Games and Puzzles

Reserve a shelf or a drawer for those family board games and puzzles.

Periodically check these items to ensure that they remain in good shape and that all of the pieces are there so the games can be actually played or the puzzles worked.

When the family tires of one of these games or puzzles, give them away or dispose of them to keep the number of games or puzzles from becoming overwhelming.

Use Baskets

Baskets are your friend when it comes to organizing your living room. If you have the space on your shelves you can even set up a basket for each member of the family to put their odds and ends in when they want to leave them in the living room so they are not randomly running around the room.

Set Up a Station at the Entrance

Set up a station at the entrance of your home with a tray for dumping odds and ends, a place to leave messages for the rest of your family, and hooks for hanging things that do not go into the coat closet to help keep them from cluttering the living room when left all over.

Keep a Box for Mails

It is a good idea to keep a trash can for junk mail and things your family may have saved in their pockets so they can be thrown away at the door.

You can even add a hanging box or a box on your table for leaving mail that belongs to someone else in the house to make it easy to make sure it goes in the right place.

How to Declutter Your Living Room – Conclusion

When it comes to areas of the home that tends to get disorganized and cluttered easily, the living room is one of them. This is because this room acts as a main hub for the entire family.

To keep this area organized and clutter free you need to get the entire family involved and look for ways to make putting things away in the first place easier on your family to help defeat clutter in your living room once and for all.