The life changing magic of tidying up....

Official Marie Kondo

Spark joy and tidy your house, this is the underlying message from Marie Kondo.


Packing necessitates putting my hands on every single possession.  This book came to me via my sister in law who supports my decluttering efforts.  It's a very easy read and it's a little book, so you will finish it quickly.  The process, however will take longer.  She recommends that you declutter by category, the first of which is clothing. This means finding all of the clothes in your house and piling it all together, and sorting through it all at once.  Keeping only things that spark joy.  Since most of my clothes have become painting clothes, there is little joy here.

My knit sweaters have already been sorted and stored.  Another element to this system is that things are stored folded on  end. I'll give anything a try once.  The reasoning behind this is visibility and efficient use of drawer space.  You can see everything at once, and you can store a ton.

This is two drawers worth of sweaters  in one drawer, with space left over.

If you lookup Konmari folding you'll find all manner of youtube videos for folding techniques.

The sock drawer is next, apparently this is wrong. According to Marie Kondo, when you ball up socks, the elastic doesn't hold up as well, and you are being disrespectful to them.  This makes me chuckle, I didn't know I was being disrespectful. I thought this was an efficient way of keeping them paired up, but I tried her method anyway.

The socks were paired up folded in three, standing on edge.  The addition of a box inside the drawer to keep them tidy, and this is what we get.

I'm actually amazed, at how much space was found.  There are some lessons here I would love to employ with the fabric collection when the house is done.

I may even write to her to ask about it.

In the meantime tidying is always a good idea and the older I get the more important it is.