Showing posts with label Marie Kondo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marie Kondo. Show all posts

Monday, October 10, 2022

One Hundred Things ~ Decluttering

Image Courtesy Angi
 

I came across the list of the one hundred things I purged from my house four years years ago and thought, "It may be It's time to do another wave of de-cluttering."

I started the One Hundred Things Challenge in late 2018 and did a bit of Marie Kondoing in 2019 and it all felt really good.

When making arrangements for Mom to come, I did a bit more purging. Not as much, but some, and now that she's gone, and we're getting the house re-oriented, I'm really feeling the desire to clean and clean out. Also fall and nice weather and open windows!

I'd been doing a bit here and there, and DD and I hauled off a car-ful of stuff a couple of weeks ago, and I'd taken most of Mom's clothes and some of her stuff a couple weeks after she'd passed.

But when I saw that list a week or so ago, I was hit with a more solid, strong desire to really get down and dirty and de-clutter and have a clean slate. So I got started. :0)

I think I might have mentioned this before, but maybe not--

Anyway, in a blog I'd read a while back about the Swedish Death Cleaning (I think), the person said that all the brick-a-brack you have that needs to be cleaned adds a weight to you.

That really resonated with me.

And you all know by now how much I already struggle with housekeeping. Getting rid of stuff, especially stuff that gathers dust, sounds really good.

I inadvertently started with the hall closet a couple of weeks ago. One of the hall closets surrounds our master bedroom shower stall on two sides. The result being--we have a closet with a very deep left side that I can't quite reach the back of. Like one of those under-bed storage containers will fit length-wise!

As a result stuff just gets shoved back there. The bed sheets were in a huge pile, but what's king size for my bed and double for the guest bed?

(Honestly, I know which is which based on color, but you get my point, right? :0) 

So here's the closet...


To the right, where the blue arrow is pointing, is a book shelf full of fall decorations and puzzles and other random things that I do need to go through; below the shelves you can see, where the green arrow is pointing, are two wrapping paper storage containers stacked on top of each other sitting on the floor in that recessed space.

Now, here's what came out of those two shelf spaces, along with probably eight bed pillows that were bagged and shoved at the back.

The only two things that weren't actually in the closet are the top two items, in the far corner of the bed--bedspreads for my bed. One was in the laundry and one is new and was in a box.
 
And then when I was working on dusting the shelves in my office last weekend, (not this past weekend, but the one before,) I got ruthless, and when all was said and done, I went from this:
 

To this:
 
And boy it felt good.

I'm not 100% done...the G.I Joes at the top will get listed on eBay and that garland will probably come down too. Two things are getting packed, some things were just moved, some were tossed, and several things are slated for Goodwill or eBay. The One Hundred Things "count," not including the G.I. Joes or the garland came to seventeen at that point.

A grand start, I'd say.

And now, every time I've open a drawer or a cabinet in the past week, I've been temped to sort through whatever's in there. But then I'd derail my entire day, and I need to have a better, more controlled approach.
 

Now this past weekend, I worked on the glass / mug cabinet, the bathroom towel cabinet, and the food storage container cabinet. That's by grouping: mugs vs. travel mugs vs. canning jars.

The result, even thought there are glasses and whatnot in the dishwasher that will fill that empty space on the bottom:
 

I've added ten more things to the list--so I'm up to twenty-seven now. Yee haw.
 
I do like my stuff, but I could definitely get used to having fewer things to clean...

How about you? Minimalist or maximalist? lol

Have a great week.
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Friday, January 18, 2019

To go along with the 100 Things...


So there's a show called "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo"--a young Japanese mother and mogul who helps families de-clutter their homes and lives. I had seen it passing on Netflix, but hadn't quite decided to watch it until a friend of mine mentioned that she'd binged it. Next time I was looking for something to watch...Marie Kondo got the click. Since I have been in a "getting rid of stuff" faze, it seemed like a good choice.




The first aspect of people's lives Marie tackles is clothes. She has the people she's helping take all of their clothes out of closets and drawers and boxes and make a pile on the bed or floor so that an individual can see how much clothing they actually have. Usually it's a lot. Partners make separate piles.

One guy had over 150 pair of shoes, many of which he'd had for over a decade and most of which he'd never worn. It was interesting to see how emotionally invested he was in those shoes. Eventually though, he pared the cache down to under fifty pair.

So anyway...once you've got your clothes in a pile, Marie says to touch each item, one by one, and keep it if it sparks joy within you, while thanking and then putting aside the items not being kept.

While clothing wasn't specifically on my list of things to purge, I do know I've got stuff I don't wear and so I've been pondering the KonMarie method to get rid of anything extraneous. I'd love to get DH going on this process too because I know he has quite a bit of stuff that could be gotten rid of, but that's going to be a challenge, so it'll have to wait--life is still not quite back to normal.

Getting rid of books will be (has been) pretty easy. Since I prefer e-reading and the fact that I can carry 100s of books/stories with me on a phone or a Kindle is wonderful; getting rid of physical books isn't a hardship. I have a few that are sentimental in value, but for the most part, the rest can/will go.

It's really all the miscellaneous stuff that I'm going to struggle with because I love my stuff...all my collections and fandom oddities that I've accumulated over the years. But Ms. Kondo isn't about getting rid of ALL your stuff. Just the stuff that no longer sparks the joy it once might have. That's easy and fair enough.

I promised an update today on my quest to get rid of 100 things, so here it is...

On Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, I worked my way through three drawers of a dresser in my office. The contents were mostly craft related with a handful of other random items thrown in for whatever reason.

I was pretty ruthless and realistic about the stuff. All I kept was anything cross stitching related. Business cards were relocated. Sewing stuff was put in a box for a friend I mentioned a while back. All other random crafty things were put into the donation box.

Contents of the top draw...all that I kept were the rolls of Aida cloth, the white box in the center, and the two post cards at the bottom. Everything else was given or thrown away.

Contents of the middle drawer...everything given or thrown away except for that little stationary set on the left. I thought it would be good fro writing notes to my Grandma.

 The bottom drawer "before"...

Contents of the bottom drawer...the fabric and the patterns went into a box for my friend. The cross stitch related items went into one of the other two drawers. A few things went into the donation box or the trash. See below what's left in the drawer now.


Marie Kondo is all about using small boxes for sorting and organizing small items within drawers. I took her method to heart as you can see. I used to use plastic shoe box containers a lot to keep things like batteries and light bulbs sorted. I've gotten away from it as a general practice, but the clean lines of sorted possessions is speaking to me again. Here I used empty boxes from 12-packs of Ramen Soup. I had one sitting around and pulled the other one out of the cabinet, leaving the packages of soup in a stack.

I guess I just have to classify everything I got rid of as two items: one of miscellany and one of sewing stuff. That puts at me at thirty-two items. :0)

Have a great weekend, y'all.


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