KonMari Method: Tidying up Komono Items

Hello Friends,

I hope you are doing well. This week I knitted a bit more of the spiral socks, but I was pretty busy and did not finish the first sock yet. I read more of The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory this morning and I am really loving the book and the characters. I decided to continue on with the KonMari method yesterday, I had stopped for awhile in July it was a busy month with going away on vacation and visiting family and all the busy-ness of summer. I brought all my miscellaneous items into the living room and dumped them on the floor. I brought items from the office, my bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room and dining room. I will be tackling the kitchen another weekend because there is a lot in there too and it will take me a couple of days. The cupboards are packed and I have trouble getting to things and need a way better storage system than I have. Especially for chips and snacks right now I just toss them into the cupboard where there is space and it gets harder to see what is in there.

While going through my Komono items I thought about how much stuff I had on my living room floor. It looks like a lot less when items are hidden away in drawers and containers. Bringing everything out in the open onto the floor helps to actually see how much we have. I was thinking how each of us has our own piles of items that we need to make our lives go smoother and we use in order to live fuller and happier lives. I realized in the end how little items I actually need in order to go about my everyday life and the rest is clutter and keeping me from living in a tidy and orderly home. I came upon some items that brought back some memories and said thank you to the person who gifted it to me and gave it away. It was a freeing exercise as this person is not in my life anymore but I held onto the gift because of the fact that they had given it to me.

I organized my yarn stash as well and am going to give away some yarn skeins I won't be using. Before I organized it, there were some tangled skeins and I had some that I hadn't used in a long time...

Before

 Now it is organized and I only have the yarn that I will use.

After

Below is a keep pile of my favorite artists CD's. I am giving away more than half of the CD's I owned. I also kept a couple of tapes I had recorded with my sister when we were younger. I want to try to convert it to be able to play it on my computer someday.

 

Below is a wicker basket where the CD's lived and now it is way more organized now that I am keeping only CD's that spark joy and I feel happy owning. I also kept my Game boy advance and a couple of games.

I had so many pens and pencils and ended up throwing out some that didn't work and giving some away. I had a whole extra Ziploc bag full of pens and pencils as well as those pictured below. As Marie Kondo says you should get rid of the excess now so you can live an organized life then buy them as you need them. I like this mentality. So much of the time we hold onto items that we don't need in fear of not having what we need. I was worried that I would run out of pens or not have what I need, but you can always buy some more pens right before you are about to run out.

I had so many body lotions and body butters and realized I did not need that many. I was gifted  body lotions and body butters a lot last Christmas and still had some from other years. In the end I threw out the ones that had been open as I did not know when I had used them last and kept only a few lotions and butters. These really built up for me and become clutter because I only use lotion in the Winter when my skin is dry and the rest of the year I don't use it. 

I got rid of some products I wasn't using and had more space to set up my nail polish and body butters so I can see them all easy and access them. Before my nail polish was spread out on my dresser and I couldn't see them easily. 

 I arranged some of my planner supplies in this wicker basket and put it beside my desk and my planner is lying in front of it so it is easy to access. The rest of my stickers are in a folder and I am considering putting them all in the basket because it is not easy managing the heavy folder after all.

I also went through holiday stuff and picked out a lot of the decor items that I could give away. Each year I buy something new for Fall and Christmas decor,  so I needed to make choices on what I would be keeping.  I also reorganized my Christmas ornaments so that they are in a container instead of multiple bags where we first placed them in their ornament boxes and put them into the bags but it was not organized in the closet.

In the end the stuff is just that, stuff... that clutters our lives if they don't bring us joy or fill a need. I do feel lighter and better after this weekend of going through more of my belongings. Next step is to work on decluttering and organizing the kitchen, then the final step is going through sentimental items and I am finished going through all the organization steps in the KonMari method. I will be sharing how everything looks after I am finished the steps and which storage solutions I use, and how this process helps me to keep organized once I am finished. I will also discuss how I feel about continuing with this process in the future. I think this has been so good so far and I really think that bringing all like items together from all rooms in the house works for me well. I like it because I can tackle all the items of one category at once and not have to deal with the same items in multiple rooms. I can see myself using this system from now on to keep organized as it has worked really well for me so far.

Thank you for visiting today! have you tried the KonMari method and does it work for you?

Have a great day!

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.