I am all in for Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing." I don't spend a huge amount of time at home, but I have gotten a good head start on putting her advice to work. I'm hoping to apply it to every category of possession I own by next spring.
It started when I bought a huge IKEA wardrobe from some friends who were moving out of state. I have a very small room in my house that was originally a bedroom before previous homeowners took over some of its square footage to make our main bathroom larger. Now I use it as a dressing room. Until I got the wardrobe, I kept my clothes in an antique dresser and on a metal clothes rack. I also had a big, wooden shelving unit where I kept books, board games and miscellaneous stuff.
When I started the clothing purge, I gathered every garment I owned from every part of the house and piled them on the floor. When all was said and done, I got rid of seven huge trash bags full of clothes, two bags of games, two big boxes of books (the serious book purge is still to come) and quite a few other random objects that I'd been keeping for no good reason. After a clothing exchange with friends, the number of bags of clothing I ended up dropping at Goodwill grew to ten. That was several months ago and already I've identified a few survivors of the cull that could stand to go.
Even before the clothing purge, I selected thirty t-shirts whose designs I enjoyed despite the fact that I no longer wore them for various reasons and had them made into a t-shirt quilt. I'll save that story for another post, but it was a great way to get a head start on the whole project.
Once I had the wardrobe set up in my dressing room (which I left to a service that does that kind of thing because it was huge and there was no way I could reassemble it on my own), I learned a bunch of cool folding techniques designed to make clothes as compact and wrinkle-free as possible. The only drawback has been that I don't really have a convenient spot in my house for folding clothes, so I have gotten to the point where I don't put my laundry away as promptly as I should. But when I do, the results are pretty impressive.
Best of all, it's taken my dressing room from a place that was just stuffed with stuff to a room I can actually decorate and enjoy. I've framed and put up a bunch of artwork that had been languishing all over the house and I really like the atmosphere of the room.
The only thing the room still needs is for me to install a new ceiling light fixture. The old one was in the way of the wardrobe, so I took it down. The new one is a pendant light that I'm going to swing out of the way and treat as a swag lamp with a strategically-placed ceiling hook. I just need to bring in the ladder and take a few minutes to get it done.
Next on the agenda is probably my pantry closet in our TV room. It's gotten out of control and I know I can live without a lot of the stuff in there. (Ice shaver? Nope, I don't need it.)
After that, I'll tackle kitchen drawers and cupboards, and my home office, which was looking pretty good for a while last year but has descended back into chaos. The basement and garage will get their turn as well.
Have you done any Kondo-ing of you house? What did you think?