What’s the first space in your home that experts recommend tackling when you declutter? If you said the living room, kitchen or foyer, guess again. It’s the bedroom.

“I always start with the bedroom,” says feng shui consultant Andrea Gerasimo of Menomonie, Wisconsin. “It’s your sanctuary.” Gerasimo cites studies showing that what you’re thinking when you nod off affects how you sleep and your mood when you wake up. So if your last mental image is of chaos and clutter, you’re not setting the right stage for quality sleep.

In your bedroom, do you trip over piles of clothing, boxes, shoes and assorted tchotchkes? Are stacks of DVDs careening from your bedroom entertainment center? Or, perhaps you’ve placed your home office—with its tangle of computer and phone lines, file folders, sticky notes and miscellaneous office supplies—in your sleep space.

The good news is that you don’t have to remodel to streamline your bedroom. Rearranging furniture (even better, removing a few items), decluttering and adopting a resolute mindset to keep your space harmonious and clutter-free are simple steps that can make a big difference.

Transform your bedroom from cluttered chaos to serene retreat with these easy tips. 

1.Furniture: Less is More

Having too many dressers, tables and chairs jammed into a space—no matter how large—makes it feel smaller. And stuff attracts more stuff. As we add more pieces, we tend to fill them, inside and out.

Solutions:

■ Invite a friend with a fresh set of eyes over for a streamlining session. Move everything out, then open your mind to new arrangements. Bring in the pieces you love most until the room seems adequately furnished but not overly stuffed; the remaining furniture is probably unnecessary.

■ Think about what you can donate, use elsewhere or sell. Candidates for the chopping block may include exercise equipment, a dresser, even your television. Family manager coach Beth Dargis of Holland, Michigan, singles out dressers as occupying too much space in a room. (What’s more, their long, low surfaces invite clutter, she says.) Whenever possible, Dargis recommends replacing a dresser with a highboy, which holds roughly the same number of items but with a smaller footprint.

■ While everything is out of the room, consider spiffing up your walls with a fresh coat of no- or low-VOC paint (VOCs are volatile organic compounds that outgas into the air). If you want to change your window treatments to hemp or organic cotton, this is an ideal time. At the very least, give your bedroom a good, thorough cleaning before moving furniture back in.

2.Clothing: The Hidden Culprit

Anytime you declutter a bedroom, you invariably run into a surfeit of clothing, shoes and accessories. This accumulation is the root cause of a number of ills. “People cram in another piece of furniture instead of going through their wardrobes and getting rid of what no longer fits,” says New York interior designer John Loecke, author of the Organizing Idea Book (Taunton, 2006). Many times, Loecke has seen couples introduce substantial armoires to the bedroom to accommodate one person’s wardrobe because the other’s has overtaken the closet.

Solutions:
■ First, simply pare down. Set aside half a day (with a decluttering buddy, if you can find one) and go through your wardrobe ruthlessly, donating what no longer fits, what you haven’t worn in a year or two, and what’s outdated. Take everything out of the closet and put it in piles to donate or consign, trying on only the items you aren’t sure about. (In the process, I guarantee you’ll discover at least one “treasure” that you’ll want to reclaim!)