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Feel the clothing item in your hands.
Take each piece and see how your body responds.
Are you happy? Does it take you back? Does it make you feel warm and fuzzy – on the inside?
That’s the Marie Kondo way of clearing up and out. And after watching season one of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, we can’t help but stare at every last item in our cupboards thinking, “Well this is a pretty sweater, but… does it spark joy?”
The show, based on Kondo’s bestselling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, focuses on the Japanese decluttering concept of "danshari" – to "refuse", separate and dispose of, according to Bloomberg. But it goes beyond just physically disposing of items you no longer need. It’s more about the process of decluttering one’s house – literally – along with one’s spiritual home. It’s a way of cleaning up your life and developing oneself.
“My mission is to spark joy in the world through tidying,” explains Kondo in the trailer for the show that we just can’t get enough of. In fact, we were so inspired we KonMaried the house upside down.
And you would too be inspired, if you’ve ever looked through the kids’ cupboards for a specific jersey ten minutes after you needed to leave home. Or woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and found yourself in excruciating pain after stepping on a rogue block of LEGO.
So focusing specifically on the clutter in and around the kids’ rooms, we picked up every last block of Lego and asked, “Does it spark joy?” Spoiler alert: it didn’t. But for the sake of the kids’ happiness, at the very least we managed to organise the plastic blocks from hell.
Scroll up to see the five simple hacks we used to organise the kids’ toys, stationery, shoes and clothes. ProTip: We used Marie Kondo’s method of folding...
And it really is life-changing!
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Do you have any tidying up hacks? Send them to us we may share them with our readers?
