How to KonMari: My Tidying Up Experiment

I’m sure by now that you’ve heard of Marie Kondo and her book The Life-Changing Magic Art of Tidying Up. Her new Netflix series is definitely binge-worthy and inspired Danny and I to clean out our closet again (we had just gone through it 4 months prior). There’s just something fun and magical about organizing a space. The magical process as described by Marie Kondo is called KonMari. The first step of the process involves tidying up your clothes. This is the step that we enjoyed tackling a few days ago.

Here’s how to KonMari your clothes:

• As she describes, the first step in the process is to take out all of your clothes, the ones hanging and in drawers, and lay them out to see on your bed. At first this task seems tedious and daunting – as if you’re making your disorganization even worse – but as you begin to tidy, you realize the method behind the madness. Having all of our clothes out of our closet and drawers really helped us to visualize everything that we have – it really gives you a deep appreciation for everything that you’re blessed with. It also helped to show us that we have way too much that we don’t use, which gave an even bigger impetus to purge more clothes.
• The next step is to go item by item deciding if the item “sparks joy” for you. At first it seemed like we would never be able to go through each item, but once you start, it becomes fun! Only the items that you love and bring joy to you, you keep. Anything else, you part with. It felt so good to remove so many clothes that I had never even worn or didn’t like anymore. Overall, it took us 6.5 hours to go through all of our clothes combined. To be honest, the time flew by and we had a lot of fun! So much so that we finished at 3 AM 😉
• The final step is organizing all the items that you keep nice and neat. For instance, she recommends storing your clothes vertically in your drawers to save space and to also show what you have. I love this method of organization. We made sure to put back the clothes that we kept in the drawers in this fashion. From the clothes that we didn’t want anymore, we bagged up to donate and threw away the ones that were too worn.

Tips:

• Set aside time to KonMari your closet and make it fun! For example, we blasted our favorite songs on Apple Music and made it a fun date night.
• Be aggressive with discarding clothes – only keep what “sparks joy.” We have cleaned out our closet so many times in the past, but this time we aggressively went through our clothes and were able to actually keep the clothes that we like and it has helped bring so much space to our closet. The longer we were cleaning out our clothes for, the easier it was to discard more clothes.
• Store away all of your ‘holiday’ clothes in one section. We chose our favorite Christmas sweaters, Halloween shirts, etc. and stored them away in a drawer. That way it cleared up a lot of closet hanging space – especially because we only grab for these clothes once a year.
• Take advantage of this time to completely re-organize your closet to be more functional. Since we removed all of our clothes from our closet, we were finally able to reorganize all of our clothes into a more efficient format. For instance, I hung all my graphic tees in one area.

What I learned: The KonMari method has more of an effect than simply helping you clean up your clothes. I feel that it helps to inspire you to tidy up your entire life. Walking into our closet, brings me joy now. It seems so much easier to pick something out to wear, because now I have everything organized better and only have the clothes that ‘spark joy’ for me – no more shuffling through clothes that I never wore. The tidying up affect has spilled over into our shopping habits as well. It reminds you to double-check that the item that you’re buying ‘sparks joy’ for you and is something that you can store in a tidy way in your home. It is also so nice to be able to donate 9 bags of clothes so that they can hopefully ‘spark joy’ for someone else now 🙂

Have you tried the KonMari method? Let me know in the comments below.