Cleaning and Organizing of My Neighbors Apartment | Decluttering Junk Bags

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hello clean freaks and welcome or welcome back to Andy Gets Cleaning, the channel where I clean and organize my neighbors homes for free. And this week, I'm helping a neighbor get a little room back in her tight apartment. What we're looking at is a one-bedroom apartment here in Chicago for a single woman who has two kitty cats and very little storage systems in place. I'd say that for this job, the primary thing that this neighbor was asking for help with was systems. They just don't have a lot of systems in place for their things.

[00:00:34]And by systems, I just mean dedicated spots to put things in their home.

[00:00:39]That's a system. So, as I start by tidying up and seeing what they have in their home, I'm actively going to be thinking about systems we can create together for long-term management and improvement of her house.

[00:00:55]This is a part one as I only got to have one cleaning session before my neighbor took a long vacation, but I will be coming back to this apartment hopefully in the next few weeks to finish the job.

[00:01:07]But we make some really nice progress in this video. So, it's definitely worth sticking around to see the before and after from just a few hours of work.

[00:01:44]So, you're probably seeing that this apartment really consists of two areas.

[00:01:49]The living room, which is split to accommodate a home office setup near the door, and a nice big kitchen. The closet that you see is actually pretty big as well and houses a lot of my neighbors stuff. But before I can even get to the closet, I need to tackle all of these boxes that are lined up against the wall. I think what's really interesting about a lot of my neighbors homes that I've been helping out with recently is that I'm noticing that as humans, we tend to do the same kind of piling structure along walls pretty naturally when we have too much stuff and not enough storage. There's probably something in our DNA that dates back to our nomadic brains regarding stacking piles while keeping pathways, but I'm no anthropologist.

[00:02:42]The problem with this method is that things accumulate. And when they accumulate, there's only two things that can happen. Either these stacks need to get higher and higher, or the pathways need to get narrower and narrower. So, I'm really glad that my neighbor reached out right here so that we can help her out before this gets out of hand.

[00:03:11]It's over.

[00:03:23]>> Once I get the closet doors open, I start to unpack what's in there and I assign categories. For those of you who subscribe and watch the channel a lot, this is my typical process. I see in this closet the following categories.

[00:03:40]Holiday decor, Halloween decor, summertime and outdoor gear. That's coolers and picnic baskets and blankets and and folding chairs, things like that. I see physical media, CDs and DVDs. And I see sentimental memorabilia, things like my neighbors parents belongings and keepsakes. There's a few hardware and handy tools and some cleaning appliances as well. So again, a lot of stuff in just one closet. And you can see it's not totally unorganized.

[00:04:17]But one thing that I find a lot of are junk bags, which is just like a junk drawer, but in bag form. Now, I think this is interesting because the last video I posted of a basement storage area also had these kind of junk bags.

[00:04:35]So, these ones are a little bit different from the previous video, though, because uh these junk bags all look the same. And here's what I mean by that. Every single junk bag had kind of the same items inside it. a pair of shoes, a notebook, a couple pens, um some hygiene things like maybe Kleenex, maybe some mints, um something that would come to and from your car like an umbrella and then just some other stuff.

[00:05:04]And I had a theory and I asked my neighbor and she told me I was dead accurate about this theory. And my theory was this. I was guessing that she was going about her life like we all do and grabbing a bag and using it kind of like an extension of her purse. She'd put what she needed for maybe a day trip in that bag, take it to and from her car with her and just use it day after day after day until some point that bag gets overwhelmed. there's too many things in it. And she sets it down one day and picks up a new bag and repeats the same exact process without even thinking about it until she has four or five of these identical bags and has no clue what's in any of them. And she said, "Bingo." It's really actually understandable for me to see how this can happen. I can think of when my mother um as a kid, she would get us ready for a pool day and she would just grab a bag and put in sunscreen and sandals and candy and anything she wanted for the pool. And when we got back at the end of the day, if she hadn't taken the time to take all of those items out of that bag, it would just lay there. And so I can see how this can happen. But today, we are getting rid of those bags one by one.

[00:06:22]And if you have junk bags laying around your house and you just don't know where to start with them, I'm going to do a step-by-step process of how I recommend you get rid of the junk bags. Here we go. I want you to focus on just one bag at a time. It might be tempting to grab multiple, but let's just do one at a time. So, grab that bag. Bring it to an area with a cleared surface. Maybe that's a kitchen table. Maybe that's a couch with a coffee table, but you need a little bit of space. I want you to empty out the bag one item at a time and organize the items that you pull out into room categories.

[00:07:04]Meaning, what room does the item belong in? Does it belong in the kitchen, the office, the bedroom, the bathroom, your car, or is it trash?

[00:07:16]Three, you can either just put each room category into a pile in front of you, or if you have a few empty cardboard boxes, you can put each of a each of these piles into different boxes per room.

[00:07:32]Now, you're just going to do that with each item until the bag is totally empty. Then you can set the bag aside and with the piles in front of you, you're going to pick a pile, stand up, and walk to the room and put everything in that pile in that room. Start with the easiest room for me. I often find that's the bathroom stuff. So, I have a pile of maybe Q-tips or toothpaste or a travel toothbrush or deodorant, whatever. and I just pick all that up and I go put it away in the bathroom and it's usually just the easiest room. It's small and there's only so much space to put things. Then I come back and I pick my next room. I go do that, come back, etc., etc. Now, very important in this process, it's so easy to get distracted.

[00:08:24]It's so easy to walk into the bathroom with your handful of stuff and then open a drawer and think, "Well, I I'm organizing. Let me organize this whole drawer. No, no, no. Don't do that. Just put the items away, come back, and repeat. You can always reorganize that other junk drawer later.

[00:08:46]Now, once you have the entire bag done, take a moment to stop and think. How long did that take you? And how much energy do you have left? Do you have enough time and energy to do another bag from start to finish? If yes, go do it while you're motivated. Knock it out of the park and savor all that satisfaction of a job well done. And if you don't have enough time or energy to do another bag, pat yourself on the back for making some progress today and decide to do another one later.

[00:09:54]Don't worry.

[00:10:31]Now that I have this closet well on its way and I've moved things around, I've reorganized things in those categories so that all the Halloween decoration is in one area, all the Christmas is together, all the media is together, etc. I am going to start working on this office area, which again just has a lot of kind of junk piles. It also has this stack of blankets and laundry right next to the desk. We all have these drop zones and this is a really good drop zone. It's like in a perfect spot as you're coming in the door and rounding the corner to just drop a coat or a hoodie or a bag. So, we're going to take the time to clear that off.

[00:11:36]And you can start to notice that just by making these very small tidyups, the room looks a lot bigger. We're no longer shuffling by junk to get where we need to go. We're just walking through the space.

[00:13:05]With the time I have left, I wanted to get started on the kitchen. Not doing too much in here today, but what we do has a noticeable improvement. The area I'm focused on in the corner by the door with all the coats is the stack of cardboard boxes and right next to it a stack of large clear bins. And they are just both clogging that area. That wine chiller appliance on the kitchen table also doesn't work. So, I'm going to heft that down to the dumpster area for my neighbor because it's very heavy. And I'm actually going to leave it beside the dumpster for someone who might want to try to pick it up and repair it or use it however they'd like. That is a beautiful thing about living in Chicago.

[00:13:49]You can always trust that if you put something out into the alley on a beautiful day, it will be picked up within an hour. It's kind of a low tech version of Facebook Marketplace. So, I quickly break down the pile of cardboard boxes. I run those downstairs to the recycling bin. And then I move these huge and heavy clear plastic bins that are full of can you guess? Photo slides.

[00:14:12]How many of you have those lying around somewhere? Like the physical photo slides that you put into a projector. My neighbor actually has a slide converter machine to digitize these. So, this is one of those I'll get to it eventually projects she's got going on, but this space is not ideal to house the bins in the meantime. So once the area is clear, I give it a quick sweep and I start to create our first system of the day, which is an area for shoes. It's that simple. A system really is just a place for something that you can repeatedly put it without thinking too hard and build a habit around. Right now, all of my neighbors shoes are scattered around the apartment, under this table, back in the corner where she can't reach them.

[00:14:57]So, putting them by the door, even without an expensive or any kind of shoe rack or anything like that, um just putting them by the door is going to be a very simple but effective improvement.

[00:15:47]And this is where we leave it today. As we cleaned out the closet, we made a huge pile of donations that my neighbor is going to drop off before she leaves for her trip. And we got to declutter in addition to clearing the closet and the floor space. I do have a very large cleanup project underway that should be all wrapped up and published in late June. And I've already filmed another cleanup with a very satisfying and interesting before and after. So, thank you as always for watching and liking and subscribing and hyping. I adore you and I will see you next time.