The Master Bedroom seems to be a hot spot for clutter, especially for that of the clothing variety.
You know how it is: people are coming over and you’ve run around the house putting miscellaneous items (clutter) in a laundry basket to be “dealt with” later. So what do you do?
You put that basket on your bedroom floor. You’ll sort through it…tomorrow. Right?
It turns out that you don’t sort through it tomorrow and then you end up putting today’s clothes that were hardly worn on top of the basket. You’re going to wear them again tomorrow, so there’s no real need to hang them up. You laid them out nice and flat for their future wearing.
And then you finish folding all of the clothes that are on your bed, but you don’t quite get them put away. So you put those piles of clothes on your dresser to put away later. Very soon, your dresser looks like this. After awhile, you start to wonder if you even have a dresser under there because it’s been so long since you’ve seen the top.
Not that I would know anything about that at all, as this has never happened to me.
{Ahem.}
To prevent your bedroom from looking like mine did once upon a time, here are some tips to point you in the right direction.
Have a plan for dirty clothes
Create and implement a plan for dirty clothes. Determine where those dirty clothes are going to go when you take them off of your body. Also plan for how they’ll be sorted for wash day. The most important step: Make sure everyone knows the Dirty Clothes Plan. If it drives you crazy that your spouse throws his/her clothes all over the floor, go through the plan with him and make sure he knows what to do.
Make the Dirty Clothes Plan easy to implement
Whatever Dirty Clothes Plan you choose for the Master Bedroom, make sure it is easy to implement. I guarantee that your plan isn’t going to work if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. Don’t buy laundry baskets that are hard to open or are too small. If at all possible, make sure the laundry baskets are close to the place that people are getting undressed. If they have to remember to take their clothes some place special (say from the bathroom floor to the laundry room), your plan might not work from the get go – it’s too much trouble.
Make your plan as easy and streamlined as possible for maximum compliance from the other people in your house.
Purge as many clothes as you can
Having too many clothes causes all sorts of problems: your dresser drawers won’t close, you don’t wash clothes often because you just know there’s something available to wear, you always have a mountain of clothes to wash because you can go so long between washings, clothes are perpetually strewn about because you have too many clothes in your system.
By purging unnecessary clothes, you eliminate a good deal of clothes that are on your bedroom floor or draped across the chair. You have to put them in the dirty clothes pile because you have to wash them in order to have something to wear.
It’s like forced self-discipline.
Don’t put clothes on any flat surface
Don’t put a pile of folded clothes on any flat surface in your bedroom – not your dresser, not your ironing board that should be put away, and not your beautiful cedar chest that’s in the corner.
Just put the clothes away in the correct places. Period.
Can’t figure out how to make that happen? Sabotage yourself.
How do you keep clean clothes put away and dirty clothes off of the floor in your bedroom?
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Interested in other Master Bedroom Ideas? Hop on over to these other Room by Room Bloggers for a few great ideas:
Christine from I Dream of Clean is talking about spring cleaning your bedroom. (That post will be up first thing Wednesday morning, but go check out her FABulous Spring Cleaning Challenge (with amazing prizes) that’s her top post through tonight!)
Taylor from Stain Removal 101 is sharing a bedroom cleaning checklist you can use for yourself or your kids, when you tell them to “go clean your room” so they know what is expected, and can do it with less supervision and with better results, the first time.
Jami from An Oregon Cottage will inspire you with her frugal decorating expertise in a post titled: Shop The House To Refresh A Bedroom.
If all this bedroom talk depresses you because yours is a disaster, check out the amazing transformation Nony from A Slob Comes Clean accomplished in her own disastrous master bedroom in less than ninety minutes!
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Great tips – thank you for sharing!
The scenario you described in the beginning of your post is so true-to-life. I’m guilty of stashing the clutter-in-a-laundry-basket in my room, and setting piles on my dresser with good intentions of putting away tomorrow, only, um, well, tomorrow never comes.
Learning new habits – good habits – is something I’m working on.
I’m bad about it too! This post was mostly written as a reminder for myself: Do NOT put random items in laundry baskets to put away later. Later ends up being 3 weeks. Sigh.
These are great tips! We keep three laundry hampers in our bedroom and put out dirty laundry straight in there. It usually works, except when I get behind on laundry day!
The rule about not putting clothes on flat surfaces is great. That alone would make a big difference in my room!
This post goes for someone like me. Never taught my kids on how to manage their dirty clothes that’s why I ended up doing it myself. Need to change things around the house. Thanks for the tips!
Surprisingly, we don’t have a problem with putting laundry on flat surfaces! But the rest, well… yeah.
My tricks:
We got a laundry sorter hamper system. Each bag is big enough for one load, so if the bag is full it needs to be washed. It’s organized by load (work clothes, i.e. the hot load with socks and underwear; sheets, which includes cloth napkins because neither of these things get washed with–>; towels, at least the ones that make it to our room; jeans; and two bags of “everything else” which is t-shirts, PJ pants, cute socks that don’t get washed on hot, bras, everything).
There is a hamper in the bathroom, but from experience it gets three things put into it: towels, underwear, and PJs. So it’s pretty easy to pick through it and find a load of towels, then sort the rest into the hamper system, or to just pick through when we’re about to wash the underwear. MUCH easier than having one big catch-all hamper was! Makes it easier to work on a system of washing a load of clothes every day or two.
Believe it or not, the fact that there is no free floor or surface space has helped. Everything “extra” has to get put on the bed, which means it HAS to be taken care of before we sleep. Since the end of the day usually is fairly lacking-energy and high pain levels for me, I never want to leave that stuff there in case I can’t deal with it at bed time. Thus, everything ends up getting put away pretty quickly, or there isn’t much for Mr. Moon to do at bed time.
The biggest challenge has been the “not really dirty” clothes. All that stuff that you’ve worn for a few hours but could totally wear again. These things were getting placed gently in a pile on the floor, but then I wouldn’t wear stuff from the floor so I might as well have just put it directly in the hamper. Otherwise they went on the computer chair which then got so overloaded that I didn’t have anywhere to sit! I picked up a quilt rack for that stuff, and it sits IN FRONT of the clean clothes shelving. Which means I have to see and reach past the “I could wear this again” clothing before I get to the “fresh clean” stuff, and it reminds me to wear it again. When the pile gets too full, I will re-wear everything off it, and then put it in the laundry; shortly thereafter I end up doing a major body-scrubbing clean-slate shower, and start fresh with all clean clothes, putting everything that’s left from the quilt rack into the hamper and just starting over. It’s a weird cycle, but it seems to work for me 😉