Wellness Wednesday - Tidying up

I'm so excited to share this post with you today! This was the post I had typed up a few weeks ago when the blog ate it, we had a few days of technical difficulty black-out, and we switched back to blogger. Whew! Glad that's over and we can get back to blogging being stress free (for me anway).

Have you heard of Marie Kondo's the life-changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing? I imagine you just might have. It's sweeping the country with spots on morning talk shows and various news media featuring articles on it. As I type this I'm trying to think of my first introduction to the book and I can't quite recall what it was but as soon I learned the premise of the book I knew I had to read it!

Since the book is about decluttering I thought it best to check it out from the library. I will say though the temptation to buy from Amazon for less than $12 and have prime deliver it to my doorstep in two days was almost more than I can handle. Especially when I learned that all of Durham County was just as excited as I was to read this book - there are 44 copies of the book in our county library system and when I put a hold on the book I clocked in on the wait list at #133. So, like I said, ordering off Amazon was very tempting but I wanted to make the right decision! I didn't need to have this book and I certainly realized when I was done reading it hopefully it would do its job and I wouldn't need it any longer. 

Three months later...

I had a copy in my hands! It's a quick read and very impactful. A few of the premises of the KonMari method detailed in the book include only keeping things that "spark joy" and analyzing all the items in your house by category (not by room).

Today I'm sharing a few before and afters of our main closet. I'll share a bit more after I've tidied the whole house!!

BEFORE

AFTER

So much tidier! The before pictures are my portions of the closet (Patrick had a bar too and some things in the office closet - as did I). What is most amazing to me - after Patrick and I both completed the decluttering method in the book - is that all of our hanging attire fit on one bar. That's right folks ... in the after picture on the right you are looking at both my hanging clothes and Patrick's hanging clothes. We had an empty half closet so I was able to use one bar for my scarves and then hang some hooks on the wall for my pocket books.

I would estimate that about 1/3 of our clothes didn't "spark joy" and were removed from the household but the majority of our clothes are now folded in drawers and not hanging up. They're tightly folded and then stored vertically in drawers so when we open the drawers we can see all the shirts or pants at a glance.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on Marie Kondo and decluttering! In the meantime you might enjoy either one of these articles that I found interested - one from One Kings Lane and then another from Huffington Post.

Decluttering is empowering! So embrace it and go check out the magic of tidying up!