A while back we borrowed a system that a good friend was using that encouraged her kids to clean up their room every weekend. It’s a simple system and the way it works is that every Sunday, once their room is clean enough to vacuum, they can have all the screen time they want. This includes DS, computer and TV. In short bribery. My kids don’ t get much if any screen time during the week so this works like a charm and they usually don’t end up finishing their room until 4 or 5pm, so they don’t get much screen time on Sundays either.

This system has worked well for a while but with everything that happened with my Granny we’d kind of let things go so yesterday after reminding them that they had to clean their room, my youngest walked in and said. “I can’t put anything away because I don’t know where it goes.”, she had a point. Their room, and stuff, had gotten so out of hand that there was no room for anything and no way to organize it.

Over the last week we had already been working to reduce the amount of clothing they had by sorting it into three piles; keep, donate and trash. The latter being for badly stained or torn items. I’ve reduced them to 20 tops, 10 bottoms, 5 dresses and some pjs/play clothes. This system worked so well that my oldest suggested they do it for their room. So we did.

We went through EVERYTHING in their room and sorted it into three piles. Things that were broken, missing pieces or generally unusable went into the trash, things that could have a second life went to the donation pile and things that they wanted to keep were put away in their room. 4 hours, 7 bags for Goodwill and 3 trash bags later their room was vacuumed organized and clutter free! Theirs is now the cleanest most organized room in the house!

How do you battle clutter? Do you have a system? I’d love to hear about it.