The other day a friend of mine posted about her husband coming home and THANKING because he came home to a clean home that day.
This friend of mine has been on a personal mission of her own to minimize the things in her home, and kon-mari is her preferred method.
She accepted his gratitude, but then admitted she really hadn’t done much cleaning at all! What she had done is declutter.
I have been reading the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up for the second time and one of the things she constantly comes back to is this…
If you discard all the excess in your home, you don’t ever have to clean/tidy up!
You can actually trick people into thinking that you are some sort of homemaker master by downsizing the amount of things you have.
I take many naps these days with a newborn (not daily, but more than most people I think). And wake up to a clean house these days, but it wasn’t always like that.
Recently I did a house tour where I gave the Facebook group I run a raw and unedited version of my house after a weekend of having the cousins in town to visit.
We had a total of six kids ages four months to 8 years old stay up until past midnight. I would still have been comfortable with an unexpected friend coming to visit because my house was still in order.
This KonMari method is for real guys.
So how exactly does it work? How can you start doing it in your home and tricking your husband or spouse, or even yourself into thinking you are the most epic homemaker ever?
KonMari method.. or for those of us just wanting something simpler, a major declutter and THEN organizing what’s left.
I love this method and practice because it is not short-sighted organizational tips and tricks, or storage hacks. It’s not short sighted solutions to packaging up your junk.
At it’s core it is a mindset shift. Really, it focuses on the fact that our physical space represents our inner state as well. We can link our emotional state to the condition of our physical space! Bury our burdens in things. Or give a physical manifestation of our fears (holding onto things just in case, is often a fear of lack). It’s really true.
KonMari makes it so that you can sit in a clean, uncluttered and beautiful space. When you are surrounded by that you are forced to confront the true emotional state you are in. No more hiding behind your physical stuff and distractions that it allows.
So, to the HOW part of this blog!
With KonMari you need to start with a dramatic declutter. If you do this effectively you only need to do it once, then you can stay in maintenance mode for the rest of your life. It’s true. Our was SO dramatic that we left the only home we had ever known and moved Alaska to Florida with one suitcase each.
We had no choice but to live an uncluttered life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were living out the KonMari lifestyle change without even realizing it.
Many people think that decluttering and getting your house in order is best done in a gradual process so as not to get overwhelmed. The KonMari method disagrees.. and honestly so do I. I tried little changes over time my entire time living in Alaska and it never worked. It should be done like a bandaid.. one clean sweep!
I love that Kon-mari challenges us to dive fully in!
What happens when you try to “ease into it” is you end up being able to make excuses for why its not done yet, or why you still have a pile of stuff to go through, or justify keeping things around. I look back on our cross country move and unless I had that sense of urgency I don’t know that I ever would have discovered the power in a true purge. That is really sad to me!
So how fast is fast? I guess that just depends on the state of your home. We decluttered all of our belongings in four weeks. That was one house of our own, and the 1,000 square foot preschool that I owned.
Only you can know how quickly you can get this done in, and the timeline I don’t think is the most important thing. I think the most important thing is to prepare your purge, plan it out, then follow through with it. Set dates, schedules your purging times and follow through with them.
Someday never comes.. you deserve to make this happen for yourself.
Once you have that done though.. the rest is easy. Now all you need to do is find a place for your things. One of the hardest things I think moms have when it comes to maintaining a home is knowing how and where to store things. But when you have SO many things.. it’s a catch 22.
Once I lived in a house with just the essentials and a suitcase of toys, organization became easy. Everything had a place. I could actually find my keys every morning because they had a place of their own! Socks are always matched (I’m serious). We always have both gloves. It’s magical. And it’s been about five years of never having to freak out over the condition of my home because it’s just always in order now.
While my home is simple and minimal in “things” I never feel like we are deprived, or that we have gone without.
It’s actually the exact opposite. Everything that we have in our home is meaningful, purposeful and something I really just genuinely love and find beautiful or practical. I cannot put into words the impact this way of life has had on me as a wife and mother.
It has given me the gifts of being truly present with my family.
Our home is a haven.
I feel truly proud of our space, and love being in it, and having people we love in it with us.
If I can recommend just one thing for a mom to do for herself and her family, it is to really take the time to declutter the things that don’t serve you to make room for what matters most to you.
And in turn… trick your husband into thinking that you clean the house every damn day. When really… you took a nap ;).