Day 21 of the Decluttering Challenge: Cabinets or Shelves

Hey fellow decluttering friends! Welcome back to the challenge. Today we are decluttering cabinets or shelves in any room of your choosing.

Most of us have plenty of cabinets or shelves in our whole house that could use a thorough decluttering session. Choose whichever one you think will benefit you the most.

I chose the shelves in my hallway linen closet, so I say closet shelves count too. The other day I worked on my linen closet, but I was not finished with the whole closet. I was eager to put more effort in to get all of those shelves fully tidy and useful.

For day twenty-one, I focused on the third and fourth shelves of the linen closet. I grouped like things together, threw out expired products and corroded batteries, and took out things that do not belong in that location.

As usual, I found a couple of things our family was missing.

If you find yourself unable to find things you know that you own, it means it is time to introduce a habit of decluttering like this. There is no substitute for cleaning up when it comes to restoring order and finding lost things in your home. That is my favorite thing about decluttering. I love knowing where everything is!

We move so often that simply knowing where everything is is a constant struggle anyway. Maybe that is why decluttering is so important to me.

I added in a before and after component to my videos, at the suggestion of a YouTube viewer.

You can follow this whole challenge on YouTube here. This playlist on my channel has nothing but my 30 Day Decluttering videos.

Let’s dive in to day twenty-one! Set your timer for ten minutes, and go through every single item on a shelf or in a cabinet to see what you can toss, giveaway, or organize. Put on some upbeat music, and have some fun with it.

As usual, I originally forgot to take a good before photo, so I pulled this one from the video:

You can see the shelves were not overly crowded, but they were not tidy either.

Here is the after photo, which I actually remembered to take this time:

A s you can see, I do need a larger box for the batteries. The top shelf in the photo was not full, but it was extremely disorganized. I was able to pull items from other shelves together into like bins. Now we can easily find our soap, light bulbs, deodorant, and toothpaste.

To me, that is the whole point. We are trying to make our homes less cluttered, disorganized, and confusing. This session enabled me to know what was even on these shelves. Before, I did not know what I had in this closet, honestly.

Yes, I could use a slightly larger bin for the light bulbs, but I worked with what I have on hand that day. Always use what you have first. Maybe later I will find or buy a bin that is even better than that one.

Now all I have left with this closet is to fix the medicines, and that will be our task on day thirty of the thirty day decluttering challenge.

To download and print your own list of the 30 Day Decluttering Challenge, see below:

To start at the beginning and find links to each day of the challenge, click here.

Thanks for joining me on this! I hope you will come back tomorrow for day twenty-two, the dining room. I do not have a proper dining room, but sort of an eat-in kitchen/dining room, so that works too!

Happy decluttering!