Ok. I might be a little late to the party. But I’m just now reading THIS book by Marie Kondo mostly because the timing was perfect.
After our recent garage sale I got a whiff of how liberating it truly feels to get rid of excess stuff that’s been accumulating over our twenty-seven years of marriage.
And all of a sudden I’m on a mission to go through our entire house with a fresh pair of eyes for the purposes of purging!
Are you one of those people that has a designated place for everything in your life?
Because I am not. And I’ve never been one to master the art of what Kondo refers to as the KonMari Method, which basically says that you cannot keep a tidy, clean house unless you discard all your excess clutter.
According to this view it doesn’t matter how clean your toilets are and how well you integrate feng shui techniques into your home design, the effects will be undermined by the mere presence of excess stuff.
1. According to Kondo storage experts are hoarders.
If you hire Kondo to help you organize your rooms she will insist that storage is not your real problem. And all those expensive storage supplies you got at a bargain price? She will label them ‘booby traps’ and tell you that putting things away only creates the illusion that your clutter problem has been solved.
This is why any successful transformation of your home must start with discarding.
Did you hear that? Don’t even think about cleaning until you discard first.
(Hmm… so this is why we have stacks of storage boxes filled with stuff we actually forgot we had)
And she is ruthless when it comes to procrastination. You must use self control to resist the easy way she says, which is throwing things into a box until you figure out if you want it or not.
2. How to decide if an item should be kept or not?
Touch every single item. And only keep what evokes a sensation of joy.
This is one of her rules I totally get. I’m a tactile person and it makes sense to me that when I hold something I will intuitively feel whether it’s a joyful association or not.
According to Kondo this works especially well with clothes.
I just filled two boxes with clothing I couldn’t remember wearing last. Clothing that just wasn’t “me” anymore.
Although this technique doesn’t necessarily mean tossing out items you’ll never wear; I have a black t-shirt dress my Grandma bought for me off a sale rack that I will never wear. It’s actually for a twenty-something person but now that she’s gone it fills me with joy to see it hanging there, a visual reminder of how young Grandma still saw me.
Do you have clothing and shoes that no longer represent how you see yourself today?
Why do you think you still have those items?
3. Do NOT sort and discard by location. Sort by category.
First you must bring out your designated item from every room in your house, lay it out in the middle of a room to see the total number you own…before you begin to sort and discard.
This is how you begin to understand the way clutter has taken over your life.
This was probably the most helpful tip I’ve gathered from this book so far. It just makes so much sense when I read how she learned this trick. She spent years emptying, sorting and cleaning bathroom drawers only to discover the same items in other drawers around the house. The end result was a constant sense of déjà vu.
The root of the problem according to Kondo, is that most people keep the same items in different places around the house. So when you tidy by location you’re repeating the same work in different rooms.
Instead of tackling one room at a time—Kondo recommends setting goals for specific items.
Clothes today. Bathroom drawers tomorrow.
Last night we finished planting our big palm trees in the backyard and we have the workers coming tomorrow to finish the stucco around our new French doors that lead to the outside.
So I’m the first one to admit that achieving a stream-lined, tidy house is hard right now with drywall dust and garden dirt everywhere.
But that’s ok. Maybe it’s my age but I’m so ready to live my life surrounded only by things I love, and that contribute to my peace of mind…
Can you relate to this post?
xo
Leslie
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