We conquered clutter in our home. We didn’t just tackle it and we didn’t just declutter for the eleventh time. We conquered clutter. It is not a battle we face anymore. I mean, sure the kids grow and we have to sort through clothes to see what fits and what doesn’t. That doesn’t go away as long as you have children! But we conquered the need for so much stuff, we found a system that worked for us, and we’ve stuck with it for three years now and it has yet to let us down.
So what sort of magic did we use to conquer clutter? The KonMari method. You’ve probably heard of it, it’s the method from The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. The book gets a lot of hate on the internet but it also has loyal, passionate followers. I definitely fall in the loyal follower category!
I’m planning an entire blog series on how this book rocked our world. Today I’ll start with a brief overview of how it works.
So what is the KonMari method? It’s a way of decluttering that is very specific. You go in a very structured order and you have to follow it to the letter or it doesn’t work. You sort your clothes, and then your books, and on and on. The difference between her method and other decluttering methods is that you are not decluttering a bedroom or a closet or a drawer. You are all in, decluttering the entire house in one shot. That’s scary, I know. But it works and you only have to do it once. Just once. Declutter the entire house in one shot and you will be good to go for life. No, really. You will! You just have to do it exactly the way she says.
And that’s where a lot of people fall away. You can’t take little bits and pieces of things you get from the book and implement JUST those little bits and have real success. You have to commit all the way or you will end up buried again in a matter of months. So if you are a rebel and rule breaker, you either have to make peace with following her instructions or not even bother trying. I was in several different large groups for people working through the book and I saw countless people say, “I’m doing the KonMari method but I’m only cleaning one closet at a time” or something along that line. If you are cleaning a closet at a time, you are not following the KonMari method. Period. There is no argument to make there. The fact is she says don’t declutter one area at a time. If you do, you are not following her method. And being three years out on the other side of this, I can tell you that the people who only followed the parts they liked have not conquered clutter long term and the ones who committed fully still have decluttered homes.
So how do you declutter by category? You have to choose a workspace. We sacrificed our living room for the two months that it took to get through this (yes, it’s not a one weekend and done project, this is a COMMITMENT to longterm success and that doesn’t happen in a weekend). I called the living room the war zone while we were in progress. Then, whatever category you are working on, you collect every single item in your whole house that falls into that category and drag it out to the war zone. When it’s clothes, you get all the clothes (it is ok to do one person’s clothes at a time but you must do ALL the clothes in the house, not just the ones in a certain closet). Then you sort through them. Donate, donate, donate anything that doesn’t fit or that you don’t like any more. Oh and you aren’t supposed to feel obligated to keep something just because it was a gift, either.
You continue on through each category, one at a time. And after you clean through each category, you put it away. But this time you put away everything together in one place. For some things this makes sense, right? You obviously put all your socks in a sock drawer. But what about scissors? How many pairs of scissors do you have in your house in different places? How many different places do you keep books? School work? Shoes? The success in this method is that after you thin out your belongings, you store them by category.
Why does this work?
First, you can see what you have at a glance. If you keep all your school supplies in one space, a sale on notebook paper isn’t as tempting because you know exactly how much you already have.
Second, you have a place for everything so picking up becomes a super quick process. Seriously last week my living room and kitchen were so messy I wanted to cry. I set a timer and the kids and I went to work. In the old days that sort of mess would’ve taken all weekend to clean because there’d be so much time spent trying to figure out where to put things. But not anymore. We had the living room and kitchen looking Pinterest-worthy in 47 minutes. Yes, 47 minutes. MAGIC!
Finally, this method works because once you do it correctly ONCE, you can quickly declutter by area in the future. Because now each AREA contains a category. For example, we have a large drawer that we call the swim drawer. We keep swim suits, goggles, water shoes, pool toys, etc, in that drawer. The other day I noticed it was hard to close that drawer because it was so full. OK! Time to quickly declutter the swim drawer. Emptied it out, had the kids try on suits to see what doesn’t fit anymore, filled a bag to donate, and put everything else back in the drawer. Took less than half an hour and now that drawer is under control again. Easy peasy. In the old days, i would’ve seen a suit here or there and maybe realized something didn’t fit and tossed it in a donate bag. But now, all in one quick swoop, I’ve cleaned through all our swim gear. And because each category is contained like that, I can do ONE small project when I have time and don’t have to feel like I need to clean out the entire house. If a drawer is full, we’ve got too much of whatever category goes in there and it’s time to thin it out. You never really get overwhelmed by clutter anymore because now that you put it all away by category, you know when that category is getting overrun–and your pile of swim goggles won’t build up at the same rate as your pile of pencils, so you are never feeling like you need to declutter the entire house in one shot. You just see one thing that’s getting full, thin it out and move on. MAGIC!
In the end, we were able to put new floors in the entire house and paint all the walls–with so much less stuff, it was much easier to do it (and we did it all ourselves). There’s so much magic to how our lives changed by working through this book but I’ll get to that next time. For now, here’s an after shot of my living room!
