How to Declutter for Someone Who Has ADHD

hi welcome to Midwest magic cleaning my name is Fight Club but let's not talk about that today we're going to be decluttering a house in a very specific way because what we're dealing with is not laziness or immaturity or greed or malicious intent this is a symptom of ADHD this is what it looks like now we're going to get into what that means because in order to declutter for a household like this you have to understand the root cause so that you're not actively harming the people who live there and yes if you're not careful in how you do it you can absolutely send somebody with ADHD into a fight ORF flight mode simply moving the piles around from one place to another is enough to send them into a panic attack or full-on rage and that's why we're going to show a lot of respect to what we're organizing and we're going to do it in a way to where this couple can find everything that they had without having to go on an Easter egg hunt throughout the house to find where we put things another thing to keep in mind we're going to throw very little away the only thing we're going to throw away in this house is literal trash nothing else goes so for instance candy wrappers old broken boxes your mom we're not there to get rid of stuff we're there to organize stuff now I always start out in the kitchen because of two reasons one it's the most complex room to clean in the house and two it sees the most foot traffic so whenever you get the kitchen cleaned it has a more dramatic effect on the overall house as a whole and we're just going to start the way we'd start in any house we're going to put away the dishes we're going to knock out the the few dishes that they had left to do and we're going to start putting things away putting things away is where things get a little bit more complex whenever you're cleaning for somebody who has ADHD you've heard people say the phrase out of sight out of mind that is more relevant to someone with ADHD because that is literally the case people who have ADHD and who have accepted it and are kind of joking about it call their piles Doom piles they tend to have things in piles that are out in the open because they can see where they're at and even though it may look like chaos to somebody who doesn't have ADHD typically the person who has it knows exactly where everything is so they may have a big old pile of mail but it contains a bunch of junk mail and stuff they don't need along with important stuff but that's the mail pile the dining room table may be packed with all kinds of stuff and to everybody else it looks like just a big mound of stuff but to them that's where all their crafting and their planting and ninja weapons whatever it is they keep on on the dining room table that's that's where it all goes so they know that that's the location where the crafting stuff is when you start putting that stuff away it takes an out of their vision and then to them it's just been thrown away or disappeared and then something inside them kind of triggers and then they Panic so what we're going to do is we're going to organize things restack things and consolidate things to where at a glance they can tell where everything's at we're also going to keep things roughly in the same location that they were before we started cleaning we're just going to do it in a much more organized Manner and the way that we're going to do that is we're going to take things off of the countertops as best we can wipe it down with Mr Clean and then we're going to start putting things back roughly the way they had them keep in mind we're not doing a deep clean here the house was actually already cleaned it was just cluttered while Jason's messing with the dishes I'm going to gather up all the loose mail and old homework and any paperwork and put it in one pile so that it's all accessible from the same location then I'm going to start taking things off in that little divider between the dining room and the sink because there's a whole lot of stuff that gets piled on there and that's just a a bunch of extras so you're going to have random stuff like car keys business cards loose change a random mousse a full live living moose just moosing itself up there being a moose so you just Sho him off the countertops and then you take everything else off so you can wipe it down in doing this there's certain things that I'm going to group together that were just kind of loosely put up there so for instance there may be 10 ink pins up there I'm going to put those all together and then find a better place for them any of the Loose Change we find we're going to consolidate that into a single basket extra little bottles of cleaning supplies and hand soaps those can go underneath the sink along with the other cleaning supplies that they already have down there that's one of the things you'll want to do right off the bat whenever you're doing a kitchen is just open up all the cabinets to find out where they keep their normal stuff that way when you put it away you can consolidate it with the the places that they already have designated for those areas plates and cups in this cabinet spice rack in this cabinet there's usually a cabinet where they keep their live wolves for a security reason you don't want to keep your live barking snapping wolves out in the open because that can hurt somebody but if you put them in a cabinet then if somebody breaks in you just open the cabinet and unleash the walls so that's all we're going to do to start out and notice while we're doing it nothing is being thrown away we're creating Space by consolidating rather than moving items a question I get a lot whenever people are watching videos like this is where are we putting the stuff whenever we're cleaning because we're we're obviously putting it somewhere the space doesn't just magically appear what we do is we move it to another room that we're going to clean next and we don't worry about making that room even Messier all we're worried about is consolidating items and cleaning the room that we're in and even if it makes the Next Room more messy that's totally fine the kitchen is the focus and the dining room is just a temporary holding ground for the extra stuff that we find once we've moved a lot of that out and we get the dishes taken care of Jason is going to clean the sink with Barkeeper's Friend and then we're going to wipe down all the cabinets with Mr Clean again we're not going to deep clean anything we just want to give it a quick wipe down just to make it look a little bit [Music] prettier [Music] [Music] for for [Music] they have a glass top stove so I clean that in two different ways or two different methods I use Mr Clean to get the the gunk off and then I use a razor scraper to get anything that's burnt onto the uh surface then I follow that up with a homemade APC that stands for allpurpose cleaner and that is made with basically 70% isopropyl alcohol and five or six drops of Dawn dish soap you can use whatever dish soap you want I just like Dawn the thing that actually gets rid of the streaks whenever you you've done all this is an ultra microfiber towel it's not like a regular microfiber it's more like Norwex they call it a glass cloth but those things are miracles for getting rid of streaks on glass mirrors Windows they even work on stone countertops we just spray it down wipe it off and it's ready to go so suck it for spe once we put the final dishes away and we wipe down the last of the countertops this is where things get a little bit more complex so this couple is used to having everything out in the open now they don't have everything out in the open their cabinets are full of stuff and in fact they they've kind of ran out of room to put things so if we start cramming a bunch of things into cabinets we're going to make the cabinets so bad that you can't reach behind stuff to get to other things that you need and a lot of the stuff that they had on the countertops are going to be out of sight out of mind so what we're going to do is put away the things that can be put away like for instance if there are any spices out those can go in the spice cabinet they have a little section for bread so we're going to consolidate all their tortillas and their bread and hot dog buns in that section we can consolidate all the loose snacks into one big basket and even though this is still going to look cluttered to people who don't have ADHD to people who do have ADHD it's going to look almost naked but their things are where they left them they're just more organized than they were they're stacked more symmetrically all the snacks are together all the breads together and just those things stacked in a symmetrical nature makes things look more organized and less cluttered than they actually are or were now this is really important if you're ever cleaning for somebody who has ADHD especially severe ADHD you're likely going to get some push back on what you're doing that's not them being mean it's not them being a bad person what happens is most people with ADHD have trouble with Finish Lines they'll start a project but they have trouble finishing it because they'll get distracted or it'll get too overwhelming or sometimes they're just afraid they're going to mess something up so they never cross that Finish Line what happens is if we just insert ourselves into this situation we just start doing it without their permission to them we're forcing a Finish Line to be put in front of them and then trying to push them across it we've imposed our Finish Line on them so it's very easy for them to take this as an insult or as a blaming thing rather than a helping thing it's very very common for someone with ADHD to receive this type of help but still feel like our actions are calling them bad people in fact it happens in most of the cases that I work with for those of you who have been around the channel for a while you know that I'm autistic and the things that I do on these videos is my special interest this is what I like to do whether I got paid from YouTube or not I would still be doing this so for me it's a gift to let me do this to someone's house and I try to treat that with equal respect and I try to treat this as a gift that I'm giving them if I just jump in there and start doing things my own way and I start getting rid of of objects and I start throwing things away and putting things where I think they need to go rather than the way that they live with their objects for instance if I just emptied out their dishes cabinet and decided to put it in another cabinet that's not a gift to them that's an invasion that would be like me saying you're wrong my way is correct so I'm just going to override your decisions and just replace them with my own that's not the way to handle a household that lives with bipolar disorder and a ADHD which is what we're dealing with one of the couple has bipolar disorder the other has ADHD so if this was my house they had a bunch of spices and stuff in one cabinet that I personally would have liked to have taken out and Consolidated into a single cabinet they also had some stuff like sugar and uh little containers of different types of baking stuff in one cabinet along with some stuff that I feel personally shouldn't be in that cabinet it's not my place to take those things out and reorganize them and change their cabinets around to me that would have been overstepping a boundary because the next time one of them went to one of those cabinets and looked for the thing that's always been in the same spot and it's no longer there not only is it going to feel like an invasion but it's also their first instinct is going to be why did they throw this away even though it's not been thrown away it's just been moved so I air on the side of caution and I organize according to their lifestyle and what they're used to so that they can just continue living with a what they been living with is just more organized and stacked a little bit better the dining room is exactly what I mentioned earlier this is a place where they were keeping all the stuff they needed to plant like a garden and flowers and whatnot it's also a place where they were keeping craft supplies but a lot like a lot of ADHD households it's also where the extra mail gets laid because you're walking by it as you're going to the living room from the mailbox so you just kind of drop it on the table and that's basically where it stays over time that gets piled up and piled up to the point to where even though you know where everything's at it's no longer really accessible because it's just in a big Heap so how I handle this is that again I get rid of anything that's obvious trash two we start putting things away that can go elsewhere with like-minded objects so cleaning supplies are going to go with the rest of the cleaning supplies instead of on the table we're going to utilize a tub to put all the planting material in together then I'm want to put a lid on that and put it out on their back deck mail gets Consolidated and then we found a little mail holder so we put it all in there snacks get put away then as you get toward the bottom you're going to find a lot of random stuff so you always want a box that's for random miscellaneous stuff so ink pens little trinkets paper clips and hair barrettes and the mousse that you shoot off of that counter earlier that can all go into a a miscellaneous box and every household is going to have one of those our goal is to find a place to put that miscellaneous stuff so that it's one still all Consolidated together and two in a little bit better of a say a decorative box or something rather than just a flat organizer type of holder instead of making it an extra thing we make it a part of the decorations and the easiest way to do that is to put it all in a decorative basket and then use it as a centerpiece on some random countertop now as we're doing this we're going to find some things that we know should be kept but also we know that they're not going to be used for at least another another year so for instance Easter decorations Easter's already come and gone we know they're not going to use that for another year so we can pack those things into a tub and then we're just going to put that in the garage especially because next week we're going back to clean out their garage so we can better organize it then when we're going through the whole room once we have everything taken off of the table I'm going to shake off the loose stuff outside that's sitting on the tablecloth put that back and then we're going to utilize the decorations that they already have in there and just put a few random pretty things on top of the table to make it decorative meanwhile everything else that we've taken off the table that was big and needed to be put in another room that all went on the floor it's the same thing as when we clean the kitchen everything extra went into the dining room now when we're cleaning the dining room table everything extra goes on the floor and then we can go through that little bits at a time while I'm doing that everything that involves planting or decorating that goes into that one tub I mentioned earlier all the paper towels are going to be put in another room toilet paper can be migrated to the bathroom the moose that we shoot off the table it just needs to leave man you've overstayed your moose welcome just leave but I don't want to leave I'm a friendly dining room moose shut up talking moose oh and while you're doing this you're always going to find multiple bags just empty bags so I always make a bag of bags and put them all in one spot I'm also going to start that tub of extras I was talking about earlier the basket of extras are for all the extra small things but there's going to be a a a necessary tub for some of the larger things that are just extra stuff that we're going to load up and then we're going to take that whole b or the whole tub of extras out into the garage then again when we clean the garage next week we can go through that and find a more appropriate place for them now this also means that everything that belongs in the kitchen that was on the dining room table is now back in the kitchen there is a cleaning method that people swear by which is just handle it just once and for a regular everyday household that makes total sense especially if you're a housekeeper and you're press for time that's a perfect cleaning method when you're decluttering a house with ADHD on this level that does not work it is impossible to just handle things just once and put them exactly where they go and the reason is because there's often not enough space to put everything all their cabinets are filled to the brim that means that whenever we're consolidating the rest of the stuff that we just moved back into the kitchen from the dining room we have to get a little bit creative with how we do it one of the ways that we do that is they had a lazy Susan that was see-through like just this little plate that spins around and they had some sauces in that so what I did was I took another one that matched it and put even more sauces and salad dressing and whatnot in it and I Ed those as countertop decorations so that they can be accessed with without having to go into a cabinet and it gave their countertops sort of a restaurant type of feel so you can use things that are functional like that as actual decorations and they just serve two purposes yes in a perfect world I would have liked to have put those things away in a fridge or in cabinets or whatever but this is not possible in this house so they're going to have to become decorations when we're finished with that Jason's just going to do a very rudimentary sweep just really quick to get the big stuff off the floor and then we're going to move on because as you're moving all this stuff around you're going to drop a whole bunch of dust and stirrups and dog hair or whatever but this house is clean enough to where it didn't really need mop it didn't need a big detailed floor clean again we're not here to deep clean the house we're here to declutter but as long as we're in here we might as well just knock that out this room is not a living room even though it's kind of set up this way it's kind of an entry area but it's also become a Dumping Ground for shoes and some boxes and a whole lot of extra stuff the couch basically was used as a cloth rack for a while so how we handle this is the things that were in the boxes we could tell were memorabilia from a family member who passed away we're going to keep those things in those boxes but we're just going to consolidate them a little bit better so that they take up less space so instead of six boxes being there there'll be two maybe three we're going to replace the shoes that are in a laundry basket and just a torn down box we're going to replace those with bigger rubber made tubs that are see-through because the tubs hold more and they're see-through and they look better so it's going to be easier to find the shoes that they need these shoes by the way are something I find in pretty much every household that has ADHD there's always an overload of shoes and an overload of clothing and again we're not there to force them to get rid of stuff in a perfect world if I were taking this over and I had total say I would get rid of 75% of all the clothing and 75 to 80% of all the shoes but I mean how would you feel if somebody came into your house and just took 80% of your stuff and threw it in a dumpster or just gave it away to a charity or whatever you'd probably spin kick him right in the neck I know I would so again we're not going to get rid of anything we're just going to consolidate it stack it a little bit better and hopefully make it a little bit more accessible than what it was there's one tub in here that's going to go out in the garage and it's a tub of Easter decorations with a little bit of fall decorations and a tiny bit of Christmas so we're just going to consolidate all that into a single tub and set it out into the garage to be sorted later [Music] spe sh then there's some clothing that's on the couch and on a chair and a little bit on the floor that's all clean so we're just going to fold that up put it all in one big laundry basket and then set that on a chair for them to go through later they do go through all their clothes and stuff it's just whenever it gets piled and it starts to grow in bulk that gets so overwhelming you're like where do I even start so we're just going to give them that start then they can put it away later on their own accord people who have ADHD and have accepted it and have become you know joking about it call that a floor drobe and I think that's a a hilarious way to describe it the bedroom's got a pretty good sized floor drobe h on we're not going to redo their laundry room but before we left for the first day I wanted to restack that because that was just kind of a mound of chaos up there so all I'm doing is just restacking that in a way that makes it fit more like it's like a game of Tetris I'm not doing anything special with it I'm just restacking it so that it looks better and things are a little bit easier to see at a glance rather than having to sort through piles spe day two was basically just about folding clothes again all the clothes that were on the floor were clean they've just they've got so many of them and they've gone long enough without being folded that they've it's become an overwhelming nightmare nobody wants to go through it nobody can get the motivation to go through it because it's just kind of daunting however I have a weird brain and I like to do this stuff so I'm going to dive in and just fold all their clothes for them now we're going to do the same thing here as we did in all the other rooms we're not going to put their clothes in weird spots we're not going to go through their drawers we're not going to hang them up in the closet all we're doing is folding the clothes that were right here on the floor we're going to put those in tubs and then we're going to stack the tubs right where the clothes were it's just going to be against the wall so nothing got thrown away nothing got put in weird spots the only thing we're doing is folding them putting them in tub tubs and making them more symmetrical in doing that we're going to keep in mind that we want a tub that's just shirts and a tub that's just pants and even further than that we're going to make a tub that's her shirts and a tub that's his shirts and then the same thing his and hers pants that way they don't have to root through all these clothes to find out whose clothes go in what tub it's not just a mish mash of clothing it's actually sorted out in a manner that makes it easy for them to find we also started a separate one just for jackets and really thick hoodies that are like summer inappropriate I mean both Jason and I wear hoodies in the summer too but you can tell there are some hoodies that are meant for like being out in the winter because they're super thick and if you wore them outside in the summer they would just cook your face off so all those went into a single tub so that they can at least be put aside because there's a good chance again that those won't be accessed for another 6 to 9 months now part of my consolidation method is to make sure that all like-minded objects are together I call them like-minded cuz I give them a little personality whenever I'm doing things so all the shirts have a certain personality all the pants have a personality so if the box is a party I'm just inviting friends who are like-minded to that party the reason I'm saying that is because inevitably there will be a question about where we put fill-in the blank so if it's a piece of jewelry that's easy to find because I want to put all the jewelry in one place if it's about a shirt all the shirts are in one set of tubs we filled nine tubs with clothes here by the way so if they ask about a shirt it's going to be you know it's in one of these three or four shirt tubs if they ask where their moose went I'll just have to be like man I'm sorry but I kicked him out he the last I saw he was walking down the street into the sunset crying there unfortunately is no moose tub and they're just going to have to deal with that sometimes you have to demous a house without permission and just hope to get forgiveness later it's for their own good and I'm not putting up with it I'm not putting up with it for now the one downside to cleaning in this way or to organizing in this way is that the room is still going to have a ton of stuff in it it's going to be more walkable once we get it done because we're going to have instead of the clothes seeping out into a big clothes puddle in the middle of the floor they'll be stacked vertically inside tubs so it's going to give them more floor room but there's still going to be the eyesore of nine tubs stacked against two different walls but again we're not looking for Perfection I'm not cleaning this the way that I'd clean a house that just has sort of an overload of stuff and doesn't have ADHD and doesn't have bipolar disorder in the household I'm organizing this in a way that suits their lifestyle so there will be people who look at this and think God I would have gotten rid of this or I'd have just thrown this away and not even told them and I'm glad they didn't have you in their house you do that in your house and that's awesome that you would do that but to do that to other people isn't helping it's a violation in fact you start throwing away things without their knowledge it's an actual criminal act the D and ADHD stands for disorder this is not a choice it's a disorder this is how it manifests so looking in on a household like this and blaming them for this condition is like seeing somebody with a cast on their leg and then blaming them for being lazy and not just getting up and running if you're looking to assign blame or fault in a situation like this you're the problem we're looking to help and provide a solution not some weird sense of justice or punishment if a friend comes to you with depression you don't yell at them for being depressed if you do they're the one who needs to find a new friend not you quickly some very important notes that I'd like you all to know um there are many many accounts faking being me and normally I don't care about that but there are also contacting hundreds upon hundreds of people trying to get personal information out of them I have four social media accounts YouTube Facebook Tik Tok and Instagram that's it there are no backup accounts there are no fan pages there are four accounts that are real and all others are fake you can find all four of those accounts linked in the description description of this video and all my other videos that are mostly recent you can also find all four of those linked on the actual YouTube page there will either be an about tab or right up at the top there will be a description of of what the YouTube page is and you'll see a little thing that says see more and when you click that see more it'll have all the links of my social Pages if my social pages are not linked right there they are not real don't respond to the people who are trying to message you they're trying to scam you just report them also if you haven't subscribed yet we are closing in on half a million subscribers once we hit a million we get a gold plaque for that and if the the only thing that I want out of this channel is that gold plaque I do all these houses for free and in fact in most of these houses I pay anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per cleanup for things like travel hotels dumpsters cleaning supplies food and many times I'll buy decorations for the house or do a bunch of repairs I'm not asking for any money back on any of that all I want is the gold plaque so if you could hit subscribe that is the best way to help the channel and it's totally free there is a paid membership for the channel if you click that there are three tiers the first tier gets you access to Discord the second tier gets that and also an extra video every Wednesday the third tier is just for people who have a lot of extra money and want to financially support the channel in a more heavy way when I can for that tier I typically will live stream the cleanings that I do in these videos so they'll see me doing all this in real time I can't always do that because sometimes I'm out in the country and just have no signal but when I can I do live stream those we also have a merchandise Shop with a lot of ridiculous t-shirts and coffee mugs and mouse pads and all the stuff you'd expect in a merch shop all that stuff is linked in the description of this video if you can't afford merch and you can't afford to become a paid member of the Channel please don't do that I don't want people spending money when they shouldn't be spending money on extra frivolous things which this is extra and frivolous anyway thanks for watching members I'll see you this Wednesday everybody else I'll see you next weekend later e e e

Channel: Midwest Magic Cleaning

Views: 618,173

Keywords: Housekeeping, cleaning, satisfying, timelapse, time lapse, house cleaning, organization, organizing, free, free cleaning, depression cleaning, depression help, kindness, help, autistic, autistic cleaning, hoarder, hoarder cleanup, extreme clean, extreme cleaning, hoarder cleaning, biohazard cleaning, biohazard cleanup, ADHD, ADHD Cleaning

Id: -HjkBfmO8SQ

Length: 39min 52sec (2392 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024