Are you tired of complaining about the state of your teenager’s room?
If your requests to tidy up fall on deaf ears, try giving them our step-by step guide. It might just work* AND you will regain your sanity!
* We cannot vouch for compliance in the actions of your teenager when undergoing our step-by-step guide! However if I could wave a magic wand for you, I sure would!
A Step-By-Step Guide To Organizing Your Room
1. Put On Some Music
Dial up your mood and mindset by putting on music that help you get moving.
It will also feel like the time goes faster as you work away while singing or humming along.
2. Look Around You
Stand in the doorway of your room and take a good look around.
What do you see?
Think about what your parent/s see when they stand in the doorway and look in your room.
Taking a good look around you will help you decide where to start with step 3.
3. Put Things Away
Let’s just start this process by putting things away. Pick your clothes off the floor and hang them up or take them to the laundry. Put things in drawers or cupboards. Throw out any rubbish.
In this step you are not decluttering as such, you are simply tidying your room.
The end result of this step will be that everything is put away, neat and tidy.
If you’re happy with the result you might even want to dust, wipe things over or run a quick vac over the floor. But let’s not get carried away! As a bare minimum, make the room tidy.
4. Start Decluttering
To begin this step you will need three boxes or large trash bags. These are for:
- Trash (this is for items you no longer want or need, or that are broken/torn/tatty beyond repair)
- Donation (this is for items you no longer want or need, in good condition and/or working order that someone else would appreciate).
- Storage (this is for seasonal items that are taking up valuable space & can stored elsewhere)
Pick an area of your room to focus on.
It may be your bedside table, for example. Start going through the contents of the drawers or shelves and start deciding what you’re going to do with these items.
Items you keep need to be folded or returned neatly. Other items are discarded as suggested above.
As you work your way around your room, think:
- Have I outgrown this item?
- Do I really need this item in my life?
- Is this item just taking up space or do I actually use it?
All of these considerations are important when trying to maintain a positive and effective mindset for the long-term goal of keeping your room organized.
Important – Suggested Time Frames
Steps 1-3 may be all you have time for today. And this is ok, for now.
I would think a minimum of 30 mins is all you need to get started. It’s amazing how much you can achieve in 30 minutes once you get going.
Come back to Step 4 as soon as you can, remembering that you don’t want to lose momentum so it’s best turn up the volume and keep going.
Step 4 may take you some time. It depends how cluttered your room is.
If you have a short attention span I would suggest that you spend at least 30 minutes a day focusing on different areas in your bedroom. I doubt it will take that long, but it’s a good time reference to guide you.
Strategies To Help You Stay Organized
Ways to keep your room neat and tidy at all times can simply mean:
- Put a laundry basket in the corner of your room so all dirty laundry ends up in one spot.
- Get a small trash bin so everything you discard goes straight into the bin. All non-food items of course. We don’t want to be attracting any uninvited guests into our room.
- Put up some hooks if that will help with bags, jewelry, scarves or belts.
- Make your bed in the morning. There is something strangely magical about a bed that’s been made. It makes your room look tidier immediately and seriously requires very little effort.
- Hang stuff up! Don’t throw your jacket on the bed or on the floor. Hang it up straight away and keep walkways clear.
Are You Finished?
Well done!
Give yourself a pat on the back or reward yourself with a little treat!
Taking a little time each day to maintain your bedroom will help ease tension and stop your parent/s from nagging you about cleaning up your room.
It’s worth a try, isn’t it?
It’s a really great ideal to keep room tidy it really works
This is super easy to follow and I didn’t realise how the time flew at all. I ended up with a super clean room!
My daughter was so surprised when she saw her new room
This really helped thank you.
This article was very helpful for me because it is almost Easter and we have a lot of people coming over and my room is a big mess. Now it is clean and I will try to keep it that way! Thank you
It helps for me to grab a broom and sweep everything into on big pile and pick up clothes, then stuff that doesn’t need to be thrown away, after that I sweep everything else up and throw it in the trash you, you guys should try it some time!
This was really helpful for me because my dad always gets on me about cleaning my room and I finally got it done in no time!!!
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got a clean and organized room.
I clean my bedroom.
yeah but what about space for my violin, grand piano, bow, rosin, etc?
and the rest of sheet music papers, music stand and other things! i need space for those too, i have nearly 20 pounds of sheet music lying around!!!!!
You could get some cute magazine files to put the sheet music in so that it doesnt go everywhere if you look on Monday there will be all kinds of styles and then just line them up along any surface you have. For the piano you must already have a space for that and if you have a a space on the wall get a stand and just store it somewhere out of the way
Sheet music is not always 8.5 x 11. You don’t want it to curl, so store it flat. I stored some in Pendaflex files and others in large storage cubes on side. Dividers with tabs allowed me to find things. (Former music librarian)
if there’s as much as i’m assuming there is, you could maybe get a bookcase and different sized folders to put on the shelves? it’s almost been a month so maybe you figured it out already lol, just throwing it out there
Great ideas, I was thinking last night that my son is coming and how will i surprise. I will gift a super clean room. Sound like crazy!
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Thank you for helping me out I have a teenager boy and his room is like a tip dumpling yard and the piles in his room are as the height of his bed plates old toys it took me 3 hours to sort out because he had old Xbox 360’I phones,I pads. I pods, and lots of old clothes he does not want or need the bathroom wad even worse hair gel and lots of toiletries he does not use and is out of date and he also got to back when he was 7 years old and now he is 14 years old it took 4 bags of rubbish and 3 boxes for the charity shop what do I do it took 3 hours how can I fix this and get him to tidy up every week ?
This is great! My daughter read 1. and yelled out “Yeah! I like this already!”
Thank you! I’m printing this for my 9yo girl when I get home 🙂