If you’re anything like me, you have a very difficult time cleaning my room. I get distracted by things I find that I haven’t seen in a while, I get lazy, I get overwhelmed–and so my room usually stays in a state between messy or almost clean.

Saturday, I decided to change this and I now have the Ultimate List on How To Clean Your Room (click it to download the checklist).

Before you even start, have the mindset “I’m not going to be lazy.” Also, go ahead and assume you WILL NOT SIT DOWN. Sitting down is like an arrow to the heart of your motivation. And open your curtains already. It’s dark in here and we do better in well-lit environments.

1. Minimize the things that distract you. I shut down my laptop, but it in the back with the chords and put it in my closet. I dock my phone and play music. You know what things distract you, or tempt you to “ohh, I just am going to do this and I’ll start cleaning my room in a minute.” Then an hour goes by and you’ve lost all desire to clean your room–so it just weighs on your mind and you trip on things…YOU GET MY POINT.
2. Get a trash bag and put it on your door handle. Get your laundry basket and put it somewhere close. The trashcan in my room is maybe a foot high, so it’s not going to hold very much trash. Save yourself some time and get a trash bag. If your laundry basket is in your closet, do yourself a favor and put it close to where you’re going to be working. Otherwise, you have to gather clothes and travel, instead of being able to pick things up one by one and throw them in the basket immediately.
3. Get rid of things that don’t belong. Anything that doesn’t belong in your room is the easiest to identify and move. Examples would be dishes, things you’ve borrowed from a friend, or anything that’s made its way to your room that doesn’t have a place there.
4. Handle your linens. The best way to feel like you’ve made some progress is to make your bed. I only have one set of sheets (who only has one set, I mean really), so I take them off and immediately take them and my pillowcases and put them in the washing machine. I put different pillow cases on my pillows, then fold all the extra blankets that ended up on the floor and put them away, or just on my bed until I finish making it.
5. Sort the clothes. If you’re like me, there is just a ton of who knows what on your floor. It can get overwhelming. It’s easiest when you can focus on one thing at a time. Dirty clothes = in hamper; clean clothes = on (what should be) your bare or made bed. If you don’t know, it’s dirty. Do us a favor and do go around sniffing your clothes to see which pile you should throw them into.
6. Leave the clothes alone for now and pick up everything else on your floor. Trash goes in your handy trash bag on the door handle. Put the other things back in their place, or at least near it. For example, I had a bunch of nail polish bottles on my floor. They belong on my vanity, which is completely disorganized, so I put them near my vanity to clean later.
7. Don’t get distracted! You’ll probably see papers from old assignments, old journals, photos or books you had forgotten all about and desperately want to look through. If you see an empty picture frame and say, “oh, I know just the photo to put in there,” then go look through your photos, pick the right one, print it and put it in the frame–you’ve just wasted a lot of time and probably lost all your motivation to finish cleaning. At least, that’s what happens to me. Put things you want to look at later where they go. If you forget after you’re finished cleaning, you’ll eventually remember and know exactly where to find said thing. If you don’t remember, it must not have been that important–and you probably should have thrown it away!
8. By now, your floor should be empty of any clothes, shoes, books, trash, etc. Pick up any bobby pins that might have fallen, or big things that might get stuck in a vacuum. Also, this is the time to make sure you’ve cleaned under your bed.
9. After you finish wondering how all those things got under your bed, change your linens from washer to dryer, and throw all the clothes in your hamper into the washing machine.
10. Vacuum! Now your room should look pretty darn close to clean, except for certain places that may need organization, like your counter or bookshelves. Oh, and the massive pile of clean clothes on your bed.
11. Get some hangers ready and start hanging the ones that need to be hung, and folding the rest. Once you get a big enough pile of each, start putting them away. If you run out of hangers, get creative and put more than one piece of clothing per hanger. I usually put at least two skirts per hanger.
12. Put away the clothes where they go and go switch your laundry.
13. Make your bed with your freshly cleaned sheets, etc. or fold them and put them away.
14. Organize spaces you left messy until your laundry is done.
15. Repeat steps 11-14 until your laundry is finished and your room is organized!

Look at you! What a clean room you have! Now you can add those photos to those picture frames and waste more time on Facebook, all with the accompanying feeling of accomplishment and calmness that comes with a clean room.

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