Most of us have a cupboard, drawer, spare room, or garage that we avoid. Things build up slowly over the years, and before long, every shelf seems to hold something we might need “one day.” We had reached that point ourselves. Nothing was dramatically wrong, but the house felt fuller than it used to, and finding things was becoming more frustrating than it should have been.

We had tried ordinary decluttering before. We filled a few bags, cleared a shelf, and felt pleased for a week or two. Then somehow the clutter returned. This time, we decided to try a very different approach that we had recently come across — Swedish Death Cleaning. The name sounded rather strange, and at first we were not sure whether it would feel too serious. Still, the idea behind it made enough sense that we wanted to give it a chance.

What happened surprised us. The method was not about throwing everything away, making the house look empty, or getting rid of things we loved. It was much more thoughtful than that. More importantly, it gave us a reason to make decisions we had postponed for years. Here is how we tried it, one manageable step at a time...