Making Room for the New

I wrote a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) blog recently about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo (see Wrong Twice). I admit that I found the book a little bit of an ordeal to read, and I joked in my blog that the good thing about its lengthy title was that, being a slim book, there wasn’t that much more to get through! However, joking aside, it has proven to be an immensely practical aid to de-cluttering.

We decided that the most sensible (and sane) approach was for us to make a slow tactical ascent of Clutter Mountain by tackling it in stages. We pencilled into our diaries a series of weekend dates over the end of 2015 and early part of 2016 - aiming to tackle at least one of the categories Kondo describes in her book every third week (practical for us). First we took on Clothes, then Books, and our most recent session was with Papers. I foolishly thought this particular category would prove to be a doddle - but five solid hours later, after producing a heap of papers beside our shredder reminiscent of the Nixon White House, I thought differently! We still hadn’t quite completed the task by the time we deemed it necessary to stop for the day, the plan is to finish off with a few hour-long sessions over the next week. All this stuff, I hasten to point out, was all very easily identified as thoroughly unimportant, or totally redundant and of no significance to either our present or future lives. Frankly, it is hard to credit the amount of junk that accumulates around us over time. Clutter had taken on the persona of a curmudgeonly old miser that had insidiously built a little kingdom for itself around the periphery of our lives and was threatening to take us hostage. It had to be shown the door!

The ‘fumigation’ process still has a few months left to run, however, I think it safe to say, eviction orders have definitely been served and the clean-up is underway. What’s really remarkable is how much lighter and brighter the house feels, and despite having toted about half a dozen sacks of clothes and about twenty large boxes of books to charity shops, we still have clothes to wear and books to read - but only the things we actually like wearing and books we either love, plan to read, read again, or simply want to keep for reference etc.

So, basically, if the idea takes your fancy and you too would like to try this approach, take heart from my assurance that the baby doesn’t have to be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater!

I’d love to hear from anyone who has de-cluttered in this way, or pursued an alternative method.