KonMari Method: Tidying up my Books

Hello Friends,

I hope you are doing well. I had a good week. Liam and I went to see the movie Avengers Endgame on Wednesday night and I really enjoy it. It was such a good movie I recommend seeing it if you haven't the storyline was heartfelt and there was a lot of thought that went into it.  I am still working on the Marie Kondo method of cleaning up called the KonMari Method. This morning I went through all of my books.

I have two shelves of books in my living room and I have two shelves of books and had so many that I had not looked at for years. I had 100 books and brought it down to 43 books. I kept only the ones that I will read again for reference or sparked joy.

Below are photos of the books I had before I started sorting through them and deciding what to keep and what to give away.  I sorted them into the categories: general, reference, and magazines. I found some children's books from my childhood so I put those aside for when I go through sentimental items. I also had some notebooks mixed in the piles and put the aside.

Pile of all of the books: before

 Below is a photo of the books I decided to keep. I chose some based on wanting to finish reading them, some because they brought up good memories and I wanted to read them again, and some for reference to go back to such as cookbooks, knitting books, and some self help books to reread.

Pile of books I am keeping: after

 The books below I chose not to keep because I either did not enjoy the book, bought it a long time ago and still did not read it, read it and will not read it again, or it just did not spark joy when I picked it up.

Giveaway pile of books: after

I forgot to take before photos of the shelves, but below are photos of the shelves after I put the books back onto them. The first photo are all books I am keeping and they are visible to guests and open in the living room. I will also be going through the items in the baskets at the bottom there is wool in the left basket and there are DVDs in the bottom basket I had barely looked at for years so I will be going through those soon as well.

Shelf after

The shelf in the photo below has books I decided to keep but also some other books to either give back to family members and some sentimental children's books on the middle shelf. The bottom shelf are miscellaneous and sentimental items I still have to go through. I will share what the shelf looks like when I am completely done the KonMari method  and have gone through all of the stages. This shelf was jam packed before with no extra space between the books and I was even starting to stack books on top of the books standing upright. It is a big change and I look forward to clearing the shelf even more to be able to store things properly and only things I really want to keep instead of just having a lot of stuff to try to hide behind the doors.

Shelf after with some things to still sort through

I also had a stack of books forming on my bedside table shelf and decided that I will keep only one book and one magazine there from now on so I can easily access what I want to read and not have a wobbly stack of books there that topple over.

Thank you for visiting and seeing the updates in my organizing process. There is still a lot to go through and today I will be taking books and clothing to the Salvation army to drop off, so we have more space and are a bit freer from the clutter. Hope you enjoyed seeing my process and I am so excited to continue on and clear more of my clutter away to just have things I love and use.

Have a great weekend!

Marie Kondo Method: Time to Tidy Up

Hello Friends,

I hope you are doing well. I feel like Spring is in the air today in Toronto and with that I have been in the mood for doing some Spring cleaning of our apartment. I was watching Marie Kondo's show on Netflix today and watched two episodes and then felt inspired to clean up my apartment. Liam and I have also been talking about moving in the near future, so it would be great to go through our stuff and give away what we don't need before we start planning to move to a house with even more space to stash our things.I absolutely love her method as she tackles each area: clothes, books, miscellaneous or as Kondo calls them "Komono", and sentimental belongs in groups of items so you go through groups of things in categories at the same time and bring them all into the same space to go through them. I think this method works best for me and a lot of people because it brings all the same items together to look through instead of going room by room and having a bit of each group of items to go through multiple times. The method also encourages you to keep like items together once you organize them and decide what to keep.

Today I started tackling my clothes and I folded my clothes using her method and stored the clothes neatly in the drawer. I hung up dresses and blouses in the closet and had so much less when I was done. I can also see my clothes when I look in the drawers instead of trying to find them in the jumble of clothes. It also made me more aware of what clothes I actually like or what"sparks joy"which is her expression, and how easy it was to throw some clothes in the giveaway that I had been passively wearing just because it was there and not because I liked wearing it.

I suggest you pick up a copy of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Her method is explained each step very thoroughly with tips on how to give away items in each category. I remember her section on books and it has resonated with me ever since and I think of only keeping books that I love or I know I will read again. I will start this more seriously once I go through the books and end up with only books I will re-read or love.I am looking forward to working on my books next. Last year when I started this method I got through my clothes and made it halfway through the book process because I got stuck on giving them away. This time I will be more tough on myself to ask myself if I will read them again and if not then I should give them away so someone else can enjoy them.

Have you tried the Marie Kondo method to tidying up? if yes, did it work for you?

Thank you for visiting my blog today. I will be back soon with some knitting related content and hope you enjoyed this post. I will be sharing a post each week for the next few weeks with progress on using this tidying/organizing method, and how it works for me. I plan to be done this process by May 11th, 2019 and will share my final results with you.

Happy Easter! and Some Updates

Hello Friends,

I hope you are doing well. I had a wonderful weekend going to lunch on Saturday with Liam's family and going to my parent's place for dinner last night. I gave his mom the knitted bunny topper and she loved it which made me so happy. I also gave my parents the bunny topper yesterday and they liked it. I really love Easter with all the bunnies and pastel colors and this can make really cute projects for knitting. I have been looking on Instagram the past couple weeks at all of the adorable knitted bunnies and eggs and was just thinking how much I love holiday knitted pieces, they are usually the cutest and make me feel so happy because of the holiday memories we associate with seeing bunnies at this time of year or knitted pumpkins at Halloween.

I got this felt board  pictured above about a month ago when I was shopping with my friend at Marshall's. I love creating messages on it and the last quote I made was "work hard be kind stay humble". I think it will come in handy for creating messages for Instagram and here and also for my bridal shower and wedding next year.

I am still reading Quiet by Susan Cain and Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult. They are both such interesting reads. I think Quiet is such a good book there is research stories of famous introverts such as Warren Buffet and examples from the author's own experiences. I am trying to pick up my pace in reading these as I am enjoying them but haven't been reading a lot lately due to prioritizing other things to be done.

In knitting, I would really love to find a shawl pattern soon to begin a shawl and will be looking on Ravelry for some fun patterns.

Wedding plans are coming along. We have the venue and are now contacting venders to set up appointments. As my sister says, it is busy at the one year mark in planning the wedding, then once you have all of the vendors and venue then there is a long period of time you don't have to do much in the way of planning. So I am hoping to get all my ducks in a row with the vendors soon, so I can relax for awhile. I am getting excited for the big day!

Thank you so much for visiting my blog today and if you are also celebrating Easter I hope you have been enjoying your weekend celebrating with family and friends.