Does your home spark joy? Netflix’s new documentary series, Tidying Up, features successful tidying expert and consultant Marie Kondo. In the series, Marie encourages families struggling with clutter and disorganized homes to pare down their items using the concept of, “does this item spark joy?” If you can sympathize with these struggles, we’ve listed key steps for effective tips to downsize your home which won’t cost you a fortune or overwhelm you.
Effective tips to downsize – step one: Remove nostalgia noise
Marie Kondo suggests putting blinders on when you go through your nostalgic items. It can be way too easy to unpack a box of old letters or birthday cards, start reading, and suddenly find that you’ve lost an entire afternoon to falling down the nostalgia rabbit hole.
Effective tips to downsize – step two: Tackle categories, not rooms
Another effective tip for downsizing your home is to start tackling your items by category instead of rooms. Kondo’s method suggests tackling these categories in order:
- Clothes
- Books
- Paper
- Miscellaneous
- Sentimental
Marie also suggests gathering all of the ‘clutter’ items from each category and put them into one location. This allows you to see how much of a specific item you have.
Effective tips to downsize – step three: Purge first
The most effective way to downsize is to eliminate the items you don’t want first, and then work on organizing them. People can quickly become discouraged and overwhelmed if they try to do both at the same time. Why waste time organizing something you’re ultimately not going to keep?
Effective tips to downsize – step four: Fold and organize
After you’ve purged the items that do not spark joy for you, you can then begin folding and organizing what you have left. We highly recommend watching Marie Kondo’s Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (https://konmari.com/pages/netflix), or picking up a copy of her book – https://konmari.com/collections/books
Effective tips to downsize – step five: Learn to Love and Respect Your Belongings
Marie Kondo’s method does not ask downsizers and declutterers to discard and purge. Rather, the method asks participants to choose to keep items that spark or bring, joy. When you downsize, the items you’ve selected to keep will mean more to you, and it will be easier to respect and love the belongings you have because you’ve purposefully chosen to keep them.
Are you in the process of downsizing your home? Kloos Hauling and Demolition is here to help make the process a little easier for you. No job is too big or too small. We can help during the downsizing process, or when you’re ready to have your old belongings hauled away. Our ‘junk removal’ services make the last step in the process easy and efficient. Call us today – 204.955.1188 – for a free service quote.