One of the challenging aspects of moving is what to do with all of the “junk” you own. This isn’t trash, per se, but the stuff you find strewn throughout your house once everything else is packed. These items are things that would look at home in a junk drawer, things you’ve been holding onto that never found a proper home, and things that defy easy categorization. The following are a few ideas for getting your arms around clutter before moving.

What To Do With Your Drawer Junk When Moving

The first thing you should do when you empty out your drawers is to sort through everything and toss what you don’t need. Once you’ve sorted out the actual trash, you’ll probably be left with small items that could be used at some point in the future, like rubber bands, loose batteries, and more. Take these items and sort them in small Ziploc bags to keep them together during the move.

Decluttering Before You Move: The Big Picture

Over time, everyone’s home, to some degree, becomes a storage unit for various types of items that you’ve not gotten rid of. The issue is that over time, most of us don’t know the magnitude of our collecting or ratting away habits until it comes time to move to a new home. It’s then that you realize you have quite the inventory buildup of a whole bunch of these things we call clutter. The excellent news is decluttering before you move is a great time to know this out. You certainly don’t want to spend time packing up things you no longer need or otherwise want. This means fewer boxes and boxes to carry, less space, and saved time.

Declutter before a move means you’ll not be moving that over-stuffed junk drawer or that stuff you had jammed back in your closet that, quite honestly, you didn’t even know that you still had. It just makes no sense to move this stuff.

Keeping your moving day as cost-efficient and stress-efficient as possible is a great goal, and decluttering before you move is a great way to get started.

The key is to get started and give yourself plenty of time for the decluttering part of your moving project. Don’t wait until the last day, then scramble to decide what to keep. Start decluttering before your move weeks in advance. It’s generally a good idea to tackle the decluttering project on a room-by-room strategy. This way, you can stay organized and work in smaller chunks.

Not everything in your junk drawers is going to be junk. These may be small tools, picture hangers, batteries, tape, etc. For these types of items, start a household necessity box. You know you’ll want to have handy once you begin the moving-in process, so start a box, label it, and keep it with you when you move, as it will contain some items that you know you’ll need straight away at your new place.

For every room you declutter before you move, take at least three boxes into each room. One for keepers, one for trash, and one for selling or donating. Then, sort your stuff from each room accordingly. If you have not seen, worn, or used an item in at least a year, it probably should go in one of the former boxes.

Kitchen Decluttering

The kitchen is a biggie simply because it is one of the most functionally used rooms in the house and tends to contain a wide variety of categories.

Go through your fridge, pantry, and anywhere else, and get rid of all the individual little sauce packets, condiments, etc., that seemed to have been breeding in your kitchen. You’ll often find that they are expired (or nearly).

All those kitchen tools. Over the years, it’s easy to accumulate quite a collection of things like measuring cups, spatulas, tongs, stirring sticks, etc. Gather all kitchen tools and helper items and lay them out on the counter where you can categorize them. Then, it will be much easier to see the ones you have grown accustomed to using and those that could be donated. And by the way, do the same for your cookware items such as cookie sheets, muffin tins, pots you can’t find the matching lid, and any of those amazing items you may have bought while watching the cooking channel on TV.

How many recipes have you torn from magazines or printed out that you have stuffed into your cookbooks? Now might be a good time to start scanning these. Keeping them digitally will preserve them essentially forever and is a good way to keep them organized.

Other items to have a look at around your kitchen could include plastic containers and their orphaned lids, how many of those trendy water bottles you have stuffed into one of your cupboards, and let’s pick out just a couple of our favorite coffee or tea mugs to keep and donate the others while we’re at it.

Games And Electronic Devices

In today’s electronic age, decluttering will include items from this category before you move. Everything from connective cords, adapters, chargers, and so much more. There are probably many more than one that you’ve kept in your IT department that you either don’t know which device they went to, even if you still have that device. You’ll also undoubtedly have duplicates of many of the different connectors and cables.

The bedrooms are always fair game regarding major decluttering before you move. This is where we all find clothes, accessories, and shoes we’ve not worn or touched in over a year. Once again, apply the one-year rule and clear out anything that falls outside that rule.

The Garage

The garage is a room that can be used for many different purposes depending on the individual, making it a primary target for your declutter before you move initiative. For many, the garage is primarily used as a storage space. Your current garage should be decluttered, particularly with an eye to what the space of the garage at the new home affords. If the garage part is a workshop, you should again approach the decluttering with the one-year rule.

Decluttering can be both physically and mentally tiring. For this reason, it’s important to take breaks and spread out your decluttering project.

Once you start unpacking, you’ll want to organize items so you don’t have random clutter again. Pick up some drawer dividers that allow you to separate small items. This way, you can have a section for receipts, coupons, and notes, a section for loose batteries, rubber bands, and paper clips, and a section for pens, pencils, and markers.

Make sure that the dividers are shallow so that they don’t end up overflowing with these items. Also, don’t get lazy. If items have a proper place in your household that isn’t the junk drawer, put them away in their right place. The more organized it remains, the more likely you are to find the necessary items and use them regularly so that it’s no longer a “junk” drawer.

On a larger scale, junk drawers teach us how to purge what we don’t need, organize what we have, and identify our lazy habits. Most homes don’t look like magazine covers because people actually live in them. Clutter, unwanted items, and items without a home are bound to build up, but you can devise a system to keep everything orderly.