10 Tips for Decluttering Your Probably Haunted Victorian Mansion

Image credit: Toa Heftiba

Don’t let the perpetual rain fool you — spring will come again! It’s time to open the creaky shutters, dust off the drapes, and KonMari that dusty Victorian mansion. Even if you’re starting to regret buying it from that sketchy auction site. Once your home is clean and spacious, you won’t care that the sky is always gray and your garden is still somehow dead. Maybe those noises you keep hearing late at night will even start sounding cozy, like crickets on a summer night, instead of unrelenting portents of your death.

Here are 10 tested tips to get you started!

• Keep just one grandfather clock. The one that actually tells time.
• Pick up all those brass candlesticks one by one — do they spark joy? If not, thank them and move on. Watch out for the one that opens the secret passage behind the bookcase — you don’t want to lose that one!
• It might feel like the portraits on the wall are watching, and judging your choices, which is totally not true. Who cares what they think anyway, right?
• Throw the deed to the house off the widow’s walk. Change your name and drive away without looking back. Florida sounds nice this time of year.
• Get rid of most, if not all, of the bells. You’ll have more space, and as an added bonus, that mysterious chiming in the middle of the night should stop!
• How many mirrors does one house need? Might as well get rid of them all since you can’t look in any of them without seeing that long-haired faceless spectre behind you.
• Fire.
• Having a tough time getting the rest of your household on board with your efforts? Whip out that Ouija board and invite everyone else to greet the house with you!
• If that suit of armor insists on walking around, put it to work! It can drag bags of trash outside or help you move the decrepit lumber you were using to cover up that thing we don’t talk about.
• Exercise caution when decluttering the doll collection. Some of them can see with those unmoving eyes, and some of them know how to get back into the house.
• Bonus tip: Good music makes the work of decluttering just a little easier. Get to work when you hear the piano you didn’t know you had start to play “Hot Cross Buns.”