Recently I’ve read “the life changing magic of tidying up” like million readers before me. At first I was a little bit sceptic, because of all the raving reviews. But the book has such a nice tone to it that I devoured it in no time and my hands itched to do some cleaning up. I’ve been donating and selling unwanted items and clothes for the last years and really enjoy having all the clear space. Living with less stuf also means that I have to clean less and can easily retrieve items.

Even though I know quite a lot about decluttering by now, I still learned new things from the KonMari method. Also I think it’s smart how she approaches her clients and I hope it will come in handy when I’m going to help my mother to declutter. She’s got packrat tendencies, and even the burglars who entered my parents house last month must have felt a bit overwhelmed (they stopped searching at some point ;)).

Somehow I have difficulties with letting certain clothes go. Maybe it’s a ‘women’s thing’, since Metin only uses one small closet (!) for his hanging clothes. So that’s something that I wanted to tackle with the KonMari method. I have no ‘before’ picture, but this is what my closets looked afterwards:

Does it spark joy?

Marie suggests to collect items of a certain category (e.g. clothes, books) and put them all in one place. On the ground. I decided to use the bed instead. Now it’s time to touch each object and see if it ‘sparks joy’, if it does you can keep it. Marie proposes to thank the items that you discard for their duty. For example: thank you itchy sweater for making me realize I should not buy something with wool. Again. Frankly this does get tiring after a while so I might have skipped this step after 3 items.

With each piece of clothing I also asked myself “Is it useful?” and maybe more importantly I tried it on. Usually that reminded me why I hadn’t worn a certain piece; the fabric didn’t feel nice, it was a little tight or it simply didn’t make me feel pretty.

Marie uses a technique for hanging clothes: arrange like with like, working from left to right, with dark, heavy clothing on the left. Somehow I had already implemented this into my wardrobe (O_o), it makes it much easier to pick a certain outfit in the morning. On the left you can’t see my one pair of jeans :p I actually had 4 pairs, but 3 of them didn’t fit quite right so they now live with my sister (I did ask if she wanted them > the book says you shouldn’t just burden people with your stuff). As you can probably tell I prefer to wear skirts and dresses, combined with knitwear.

On the right there are some cute items, such as My Little Pony sweaters, that I only wear at home. Luckily I work from home, so my clients are not aware that I sit behind the computer wearing Hello Kitty slippers and such.

My collection of dresses, waiting for the temperature to rise.

Sayonara unwanted clothes

Everything that doesn’t spark joy can be donated. Here are some ideas:

★ Bring unwanted clothes to Goodwill or call them to come pick it up
★ Bring them to special clothes recycling banks (containers), usually near supermarkets
★ Ask family and/or friends if they can use certain pieces of clothes
★ Have a clothes swapping party with friends
★ Sell them on eBay or craigslist if you think it’s worth your time

Konmari folding method

I’m totally intrigued by Marie Kondo’s folding method. She manages to fold clothes into small packages and advices to store folded items vertically. This way you’ll save space and can easily see what you’ve got. She says it’s best to fold socks too, balled up ones might feel unhappy. I think that sweaty feet will make them feel much more miserable. But because I’m lazy, and all my socks are the same (tip!) I don’t fold them to begin with. All my other foldable items (underwear, tops and tights) are mostly black, so I’ll spare you the boring picture. Youtube shows how the folding magic works: with t-shirts and underwear.

Now what?

Now that my clothes have been organized I’d like to pimp up the closets a little bit. I’ve only restyled the ‘dresses closet’ so far. They looked like this since we moved in and I’m really not a fan of yellow 😦

Something that I also like to try is making a capsule wardrobe. Maybe I could start with a summer wardrobe, which is now mainly stored inside the large polkadot box.