Tidying Up Real Estate: The Life-Changing Magic
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One of the most successful books to hit bookshelves in the past several years is not a spy novel or murder-mystery or even a Harry Potter adventure, but a book about how to tidy your living space and keep it that way. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo is a New York Times Best Seller.
Now on Netflix as a series, you can watch Marie successfully help clients declutter and organize their homes. You will soon learn her methodology and can implement it in your own home.
One of the main differences in the Kondo-method of organizing compared to more conventional methods is to tackle categories rather than rooms. For example, a big problem in many homes is the amount of clothes and shoes that accumulate and then become an emotional stumbling block to purge. With Marie’s method you gather ALL the clothes throughout the whole house and throw them on a big pile (a pile for each person’s clothes) and go through each piece one by one. She instructs you to hold each piece and decide if you wear the item and like the item and if it brings you joy. Learning to recognize if an item that brings “joy” into your life may take a while to figure out, but if a piece of clothing is stuffed into a drawer and forgotten, it could probably be considered for purging.
Another method Kondo introduces is the idea of folding most of your clothes rather than hanging. Hanging clothes take up to 40% more space than the method of folding she teaches. Folding clothes into a packet-like bundle and standing them up in a drawer (rather than stacking) allows easy viewing and access to all pieces. If you re-fold and stand up the clothing items in one drawer you will immediately see the benefit.
It is a fun and easy book to read and the Netflix series is very entertaining as well as informative.
Tidying Up Real Estate