Small Room Coalition: Cleaning Thy Room

Have you ever thought of cleaning your room? Yesterday at 3:45pm February 13, 2006, I decided to give my room the re-arranging it so longly deserved.

Here are two things you should before you even attempt to clean your room:

Do you have the time? Starting early is an ideal time to start, lets say at around 9:00am you start, it may take you a couple of hours to get the stuff you have cluttered in your room out and back in again. Preferably, you may want to plan ahead when doing massive clean ups.
Do you have the storage? Most of the time, we have stuff(or crap as some people refer to it) laying all over a room just because we have no place to put it. In some instances, you might want to consider whether or not to keep the stuff in your room.
- You may want to asses whether or not the things in your room require extra storage. Let's say for example, you have a bunch of leftover sweaters or jackets from the winter, you might want to keep them in an airtight bin for next winter and out of your closet. Or if you have an increasing number of books, would you need a new shelf, a bookcase, or another airtight bin to store them in?
- Do you need new furniture or new ways to keep things? If the things you own outgrow the things that can keep it, you might want to find new innovative ways of keeping them, or just get new things to keep the new or old things.

Gather cleaning tools. Most of the time, you may only need a trash bag, hamper, and a vacuum.
Start with laundry, I think a large percentage of stuff that I cleared out of my room was laundry.
Get your crap out of the room. Yes get it out, all of it.
Sort the crap away from the trash. Some people like to keep things like old receipts, water bottles, scrap paper, and etc. Throw anything that you know is trash, which includes something broken that you say you might eventually fix but will never get the chance to(if you do however really plan on doing something with something, keep it and set a date).
If your closet or drawers are not in order, start fixing them up. Hopefully you didn't put all the crap on your bed, because a lot of people like using the bed to fold their clothes.
Start arranging your large furniture. I began by moving my bed to where I wanted it, this was because it is the most used piece of furniture in my room, second is my desk where I do some work. You really want to put the things that keep your stuff in place where they're supposed to be. If you don't, you might have a difficult time deciding where to put your stuff.
Get all your stuff back into your rooms. Put the clothes in a drawer, put the books in a shelf; everything belongs somewhere.