Yes, when I first heard of Swedish Death Cleaning, I thought it was a new heavy metal band, or one of those dreary Scandinavian dramas.
It’s actually de-cluttering, but de-cluttering on steroids.
The reasoning behind de-cluttering is simple enough. Living in a mess is stressful, it is unhygienic, it makes moving around the house difficult, finding things almost impossible and leads to arguments about why we keep the things we do. Psychologically by physically de-cluttering we also mentally de-clutter too, as we decide what is important and what is no longer needed. We have freedom to move and more freedom to relax.
So with Swedish Death Cleaning, we de-clutter as if we had just died, and it was our family rummaging through all our clutter and wondering what to keep and what to throw away. And that’s not fair, we can hardly expect our kids to move all our trash into their homes.
We take control with SDC and do it ourselves. The principle is that you go through your possessions, and anything that makes you smile, keep it. Anything else (obviously apart from important papers) can go. Recycle it if you can, sell it if you want, but let it go.
Now your house is empty of unwanted baggage, if you want you can redecorate, because now there isn’t ten tons of stuff to move. You can walk around rooms without tripping over stuff, you can sit at your desk and have room to work. When you want something, you can find it.
When you think about it like this, I bet you wish your house was like this right now.