A cluttered home can equate to unnecessary chaos and stress in your life and to help you out, we have come up with simple ways to de-clutter your space, making your house a sanctuary of peace and relaxation – exactly what a home should be.

Start Small. Although your motivation to live a clutter-free life may have you vowing to rid your home of excess by the end of the day, remember cleaning, organizing and downsizing years of accumulated junk will no doubt take time. Start small. Tackle one room at a time.

Set a Deadline. Motivation has a way of diminishing once you’re knee-deep into a time-consuming project like getting organized. Don’t give up when the going gets tough, keep on trucking. Instead of giving yourself just one deadline months away, give yourself numerous deadlines to help keep yourself on track. Try tackling one space per week, it’s a realistic goal and it’ll help keep you on task while giving you a sense of accomplishment each and every week.

Let Go. For some people, giving up their possessions is something they really have a hard time doing. People have a tendency to form attachments with all sorts of household items. Sometimes the attachment is sentimental or even emotional, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to let go. Don’t think of letting go of your possessions as a negative thing but rather as an opportunity to de-clutter and de-stress your life—what a great thing to look forward to.

Sort Your Stuff. As you go though your things, sort items you no longer want into two bags—one for trash and one for charity. You can either label the bags accordingly or you can use white trash bags for your charity items and black trash bags for your trash items.

Make it Fun. Take on your clutter one hour at a time. Set the timer and when your hour’s up, stop and save the rest for the next day. You don’t want to get burnt out and you don’t want to feel like the project is consuming all of your time and energy. Put on your favorite tunes and have a good time.

Move Out the Junk. Most people who are de-cluttering their space have a tendency to just move their junk around. They’ll take the clutter from the bedroom and put it in the garage or they’ll take the clutter from the living room and put it in the bedroom – never really moving the clutter out of the actual house. Set a date, correlating with either your weekly deadlines or trash pick-up days, to dump your gathered items.

Start a New Wave. The problem you have with clutter will be an endless endeavor if you don’t change the factors that contribute to the problem. Maybe it’s because you don’t have a system in place to help keep you organized; maybe you allow family members to use your home for their storage; or maybe you are a shop-o-holic and accumulate more than you need – whatever the reason, you’ll have to start doing things differently in order for there to be change. And you’re not the only one who has to be on board, you have to get the whole family to participate.

Conquer Your Clutter (once and for all). The first thing you’ll need to do to conquer your clutter problem is to get yourself organized. Create a “home” for all household items (baskets or bins can really help in doing this). When new items come into the home, identify exactly where they go and put them there. Once a particular “home” gets too full, downsize to make room for incoming items – making it a revolving process. As you get new things, get rid of your old things. Don’t try and make room for them both. Say, for example, you have chosen to have one basket for toys; if your child gets a new toy, put it in the basket, but if the basket is already full, choose some toys to get rid of. Having items circulating in and out rather than accumulating within the home will have you living clutter-free from here on out. Mission Accomplished.