How to Declutter Your Home: The KonMari Method

Is the giant pile of coats over your banister beginning to grate? The overflowing shoe cupboard reaching its limit? It’s time to invest some of your summer into decluttering your house. In her hit book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo laid out her decluttering method (the KonMari Method) that has since gone global. Kondo even has her own Netflix show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. Ready to make a change? Here’s how to Marie Kondo your home…

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The KonMari Method

Step One: Declutter Your Home

All about minimalism, Marie Kondo encourages people to tackle their belongings category by category rather than room by room. The idea is that you might have clothing stored in various places in your house, or vases in every room, and only by seeing them all together will you be able to decide which ones you really need to hold on to.

Marie Kondo’s 5 Categories

The five categories of belongings that the KonMari method include sorting are:

1. Clothes
2. Books
3. Papers
4. Komono (miscellaneous)
5. Sentimental Items

And her 6 rules of tidying (which is really decluttering) are:

1. Commit yourself to tidying up
2. Imagine your ideal lifestyle
3. Finish discarding first. Before getting rid of items, sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose
4. Tidy by category, not location
5. Follow the right order
6. Ask yourself if it sparks joy

This last rule is the most important in her method of tidying. Does the item you’re holding on to spark joy? You can like something without actually needing it or gaining anything from it, but if it isn’t enriching your life in some way then it is probably time to let it go. When you have discarded all the items that you no longer need by using her ‘does it spark joy?’ method, you will have a much smaller collection of belongings in each category to return to your cupboards and shelves. This clearer, more organised living space is sure to ‘spark joy’, too.

Step Two: You’re Folding Your Clothes Wrong

If you really want to get into it, you might want to go completely KonMari and follow Kondo’s method of folding clothes, too. Instead of your usual piles of t-shirts, balls of socks and stacks of jeans, Marie Kondo encourages her followers to fold and store their clothing so that it is all on display and easy to access. No more rummaging through a pile to find the right shirt and leaving everything crumpled. Sounds tricky? She’s made a series of videos to help you. From tops to socks, your drawers are about to reach a new level of tidy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpc5_1896ro&feature=emb_title

Stay tuned for our series on how to responsibly dispose of / recycle clothes you no longer need.

Main image: Unsplash / @logannolin

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