I Tried the Fly Lady’s “27 Fling Boogie” to Declutter, and It Worked
When I got my first apartment, I had also just gotten married and moved across the country. I was lucky enough to have a few friends in Atlanta who were slightly older than I was and who helped me get my bearings in a new city and a whole new life.
The “27 Fling Boogie” is a decluttering method created by the Fly Lady in which you gather 27 items to throw away and 27 items to give away.
One of these friends introduced me to the Fly Lady, a home management mentor, system, and site. In my early home-keeping days, I’d poke around on Fly Lady’s site and follow her daily “flight plans.” Many of her concepts, such as breaking up your house into zones, shining your sink, and a weekly “home blessing hour” became deeply ingrained during my impressionable days as a young wife and the primary caretaker of our living space. To this day, Friday afternoons come with a loving urge to prepare my home for a weekend of family time.
As this year began and I followed the fresh-start impulse to declutter, I remembered another of Fly Lady’s methods with a catchy name: the 27 Fling Boogie. It’s a simple decluttering strategy, consisting of finding 27 items to throw away and 27 items to give away.
Always up for a new and different decluttering method (I love switching them up), I decided it was the perfect time to do a 27 Fling Boogie of my own. I chose to tackle the cabinet under my bathroom sink — a cluttered spot that’s been bugging me for a while — and got to work.
Here are my takeaways after trying the 27 Fling Boogie myself.
The most important part of any decluttering effort is starting.
It doesn’t matter what decluttering method or parameters you use. The biggest thing is just starting. If calling a decluttering session a boogie and being required to get 27 items to throw out and donate gets the ball rolling, the method is a success.
You won’t always have donations.
I love to donate things I no longer need, whether it’s to people I know or to a charity organization. In fact, knowing that others will put my extra items to good use often helps me get going on a decluttering spree. But not every decluttering project yields donations. Cleaning out my under-sink cabinet was one of these. Almost everything I got rid of was trash, such as unnecessary packaging and expired personal care products. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My cabinet got cleared out and organized and I got a peaceful space that serves me rather than frustrating me. That’s the goal.
The strategy will play out differently in every situation.
While I set out with the intention of finding 27 things to toss, doing this in my under-sink bathroom cabinet required me to empty everything. So my 27 Fling Boogie in this case looked just like many other decluttering or organizing sessions in which I culled my belongings and then categorized and contained them before putting back what was left. I ended up with about 30 items to toss. Another scenario might be deciding to go around the house with a box and plucking an actual 27 items to toss and another 27 to donate. I plan to try this version of the Boogie soon.
I’m so happy to have the 27 Fling Boogie in my bag of tricks when I feel like my home needs a refresh. Like any good decluttering strategy, it’s just the motivation I need to move from the thinking stage to the doing stage, and that’s definitely worth dancing for.
This post originally ran on Apartment Therapy. See it there: I Tried the “27 Fling Boogie” and Decluttered More Things than I Expected
