Decluttering Swap Parties
One of my favorite things to do is host friends over at my apartment. My one bedroom apartment isn’t huge, but it has just enough space in the kitchen and living room to allow me to bring together up to ~10 of my friends (normally it’s around 4-7) here in Charleston on a Thursday night once a month. We’ve had anything from craft night to a book swap to movie nights, but our favorite (so far) is the Decluttering Swap.
Here’s the gist: 1) everyone brings a preowned/pre-loved item from their home (unwrapped) to use in a white elephant exchange and 2) people bring bags/tubs of items they’re looking to declutter and swap.
As people ate their snacks they perused the piles (and grabbed things for their purses). We moved to the living room to discuss our white elephant items. The best part is that because they’re pre-owned, people are honest about why they brought the items. Most were duplicates of things they already owned/loved and others brought items they just don’t get use of (ex: a picnic basket, a red wine from a white wine gal, etc). There wasn’t shame or having to walk on eggshells. It made for great discussions and recommendations, too!
Tips:
I use the app Partiful to invite and remind my guests. It takes the effort and awkardness away from me!
I provide some small snacks and then ask for people to bring something if they’d like to share. It takes pressure off you and allows for some buy-in. However, because you’re asking people to bring items, I expect that they’ll bring less food/drinks to share and I buy accordingly.
Someone thinks they might want to grab something from a bin but not 100% sure? Recommend they take it and if they’re not feeling it they can bring it back to the next swap.
We’ve hosted these quarterly and that’s worked for us - the first time, people didn’t bring many items to swap because they didn’t want to be the person with the most but the next quarter we had many more items to swap.
I used my kitchen island and grouped my items at the start into categories (I used kitchen, decor, paper products, and personal items) so that people have a place to add their own items when they show up and there is a bit more rhyme/reason to the piles to sort through.
I recommend no clothes just because that’s so personal and people have such different body types.
I took anything not chosen to be donated!
