Archive for the 'Minimalism' Category

Before I get into my next progress on the KonMari method, I wanted to backtrack and explain why I went into a declutter mode. I had two main reasons for starting to declutter:

1. I wanted our house to be easier to clean. I kept trying to solve this by buying new storage solutions, but it never fixed the root problem of owning too many things.
2. My husband and I discussed potentially moving houses later. When I thought about packing all of our belongings, it gave me anxiety because I realized how much we owned and how painful moving would be.

After starting my decluttering journey a year or so ago, I started viewing my house in a different way. Everywhere I looked, I kept thinking, “we have too much stuff”, and it’d make me unhappy. Even rooms I previously decluttered, I’d still stand in and just look around, eyeing more things I wanted to discard. It was getting kind of obsessive.

I was also getting annoyed at my previous tendency to just collect things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having collections, but among my collections were things I didn’t like. I kept them because it made the number of things I collected go up, which brings me to the next step in the KonMari method…

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Well, I caught the bug that’s been spreading. You know the one where you watch just one episode of the new Marie Kondo show, and suddenly you want to refold all your clothes and declutter your whole house? Yeah, that’s the one.

Though I knew of Marie Kondo and her popular book before, I had been avoiding it. I wasn’t into decluttering at the time, and then when I finally was, I wanted to do it my own way because I had heard her method was a bit on the extreme side. Her Netflix show piqued my interest though.

What I saw was Marie giving guidance and then leaving her clients to pick what they wanted to discard. The end result were homes that still looked normal instead of the stereotypical minimalists homes you see where they only own like 10 things. Sometimes the house still had more things than I’d be comfortable with, but the owners were happy and that’s what mattered. I realized that her method might be more reasonable than I thought.

From there, I read her book, and it really spoke to me. She wrote about how, in the past, she’d declutter and declutter but never feel satisfied. That’s me right now! No matter how much I’ve decluttered, it’s never enough. I still feel like I live in clutter. She also wrote about how she’d blame her family for clutter but then realized her own room was still cluttered. She needed to take care of herself first.

And so, I’ve decided to use her method but only for myself right now. I told my husband I was going to try it, but I’m not forcing him to nor will I touch his things. I need to do this for myself.

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The past couple of years, I’ve made a lot of progress when it comes to decluttering our house. Even so, I always feel like I could do more, and lately, I’ve really felt overwhelmed by the amount of things we still owned. I don’t want to have this much stuff.

So, I stuck a task on my digital to-do list labeled, “declutter house tour“, and made a subtask of every room and closet in our house. I want to do a full sweep and pare down the things we own. It’s going to take some time, so I’ll show my progress as I go!

The Rooms

Master bedroom – main closet
My husband and I have actually gone through this closet before and picked out a bunch of clothing to donate/recycle. We went through it again and found even more to give away – lots of clothing that haven’t been worn in a long time. Plus, I found that I kept a broken hairdryer (why did I do that??) and had unopened toothbrushes from my dentist visits.

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