What The Heck Is “Swedish Death Cleaning”?

This article is going to be a bit unusual compared to what you usually see here at The Clutter Reports. Usually this is about me decluttering my living space and occasionally I’ll post a video of someone else cleaning if I don’t have anything to report but want to have something interesting since I have subscribers to the site and want to reward them for adding me to their emails, RSS feeds, and WordPress reader. Plus if they help inspire you and me with our decluttering, so much the better. That was the intent this week after a non-report last week and getting over a brief bout of sickness this week meaning I didn’t get anything done. So as I’m looking for a video for decluttering inspiration I came across a video by YouTube channel But First, Coffee with the title “I Finally Tried Swedish Death Cleaning (and it actually works)”. I have never heard of this before but color me intrigued.

So we’re going to watch this 12+ minute video and I’ll give my thoughts on it, stream of consciousness style. That’s something I usually do over at the media reviewing site, so I’m putting those skills to use here. Have any of you heard about or tried this? As I write this intro I have yet to watch the video so I have no idea what I’m about to walk into here. I’m assuming this is an expression and no Swedes were harmed in the decluttering of this space. Otherwise, I’m going in blind. Let’s see what this is.

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Let’s Watch Someone Declutter Their Garage

Well, I was right about this week being crazy. It didn’t help that Saturday had blah weather around here and that killed what little motivation I had to do something this week. On the plus side I get to talk about something I don’t have to declutter…because our garage was already organized before this site and my declutter project proper even got started.

I don’t understand why people use their garage as a storage shed. Maybe it’s because we have storage space, but I’ve seen a garage not usable as a garage on multiple home improvement shows because there are boxes and totes of stuff taking it over. And of course there’s the old cliché of the wife yelling at the husband to finally clean out the garage, but the task being so monumental that he keeps finding excuses not to. So I wanted to find a video of a man cleaning out his garage. I wasn’t looking for anything that required a big financial expense or was setting it up as anything other than a garage and maybe a place to work on the car, the other purpose of a garage.

And so I found this video by YouTube channel GardenFork. Here he gives tips for decluttering your garage without really making anything TV worthy out of the final product. The thing about doing YouTube videos from home is the incentive to make it look like a good backdrop or set to film on and look professional. This is just a simple organizing and clutter removal operation, which is what I wanted. Despite turning my studio into something that looks good on camera as part of my projects, DIY on the cheap and easy decluttering to make the space functional for the intended purpose is currently the name of the game around here.

Let’s Watch Someone Declutter Their “Croffice”

Thanks to insomnia I didn’t have the drive to do any cleaning this week as I only have one day a week to declutter and organize. That’s part of the reason this is taking so long, but not the only one. With the next two weeks looking to be pretty hectic with doctor appointments Saturdays may actually be a quiet time while I’m still decluttering. It depends on the stuff I do for the other site and other things I need to be doing for myself. If I can finally get my sleep cycle under control I just might be able to put my living back together, if that sentence made any sense. If not, blame it on going to bed around 2AM and waking up at 12:30 PM.

However, I did want to give you readers something to look into. Part of posting my decluttering projects or doing a deep review to see if I want to keep this or that is putting thoughts in your head about your own journey. I know “minimalist” is the craze in decluttering but that may be too far for me, feeling sometimes like the opposite of “hoarder”. I am a collector, but getting myself to enjoy my collections by not having them too big or filled with stuff I’m not interested is part of the journey.

So is there the main focus of decluttering has been, my personal living space. This includes the room I’ve been trying to turn into a dedicated studio for my art and video projects. Technically it is but it’s still a mess, so maybe I can get some inspiration from the following video. From the YouTube channel ClutterBug comes this story from 2021, part of the lockdown years. The host is using technology we once thought would exist in science fiction to talk to a woman named Michelle through videophone. Michelle has a room similar to mine. Where I do article writing, comics and other art work, and the occasional video she wants to make a dedicated craft room/office combo, her “croffice”. However her place is around the same mess I was when I started, but thanks to the host and more time that I have to dedicate she finally gets to vacuum her floor. That will make more sense when you see the video.

Making a list

I have a lot of collections, and I thought it would be easier to go through them for a proper review if I made a list. Now the Transformers and other action figures aren’t my concern. The Transformers especially have too many to bother with, a problem also faced by my comics. The video games and movie videos, however, I want a proper listing of.

My thought is that I could keep track of what I’ve reviewed for the Video Game Clutter show and the DVD/VHS report articles. (Although the videos I’ll be going through alphabetically.) Luckily I found an old Steno Book that I had originally purchased all those years ago to keep track of high scores. Since the games didn’t keep track of the top score once the game was shut off (except for some computer games), I could track my progress.

Years later I found it during my game organizing, and it was mostly empty. The spaces were marked off, but no scores were recorded. And since there was plenty of extra pages left (most of the book), this week’s plan was to list every game I own to keep track of which ones I’ve gone through.