If you've ever read the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, you'll understand why I'm so excited to be getting to the second to the last phase of her tidying categories. That category is called "Komono", which is a Japanese word that basically means "miscellaneous stuff". This will definitely be the longest category to work my way through, since there are so many objects that fall into that category. She gives suggestions on what types of things you might want to tackle and in what order. I did follow here recommendation to start with CD's. Kondo recommends putting all of the items out on the floor so that you can be totally overwhelmed by the huge accumulation of stuff you have so that you'll be more inspired to get rid of stuff that doesn't really spark joy. But, she also says that you shouldn't get rid of your family member's stuff, without their permission. And, since Jay has more CD's than I do, I started with my own collection. Then I just rearranged his and labeled the shelves so that we could easily find CD's by style of music for categories.
Here are my nicely arranged CD's, housed away in baskets on shelves.
Next it was time to tackle the VHS tapes and DVD 's. Yep, we actually still do have VHS tapes and we do sometimes watch them, yet. So, we haven't gotten rid of all of them. Again, I stuck to discarding ones that I knew I had purchased in the past or else I asked my husband. I decided to get rid of those that no longer sparked joy. Here's what I ended up taking to the thrift store.
And here are the nicely arranged ones on the shelves where they belong.
I also realized that I had a couple of drawers of clothes that I had forgotten to organize back when I decluttered the first category of clothes. So, I finally tackled those. But I won't show them, because I feel too embarrassed lest you see my unmentionables.
Also, I decided to take on the overstuffed drawers in my bathroom. I didn't get the before picture, but here's what the drawers look like after decluttering and organizing the stuff. I found that I saved a ton of space by putting things in boxes. You don't have to buy any fancy organizers. All I did was cut a kleenex box down in size so that it would fit in the drawer to house some items. This way I was able to consolidate and fit more items in one drawer.
Kondo recommends placing items vertically in boxes to save space and so that you can see exactly what you have in each drawer. It works really well! I also discovered that placing my cotton balls in a mason jar was an easy space-saving trick.
All of this cleaning up was making me want to move forward with my painting project that I've been working on in our basement since about a year after we moved in. It's been a long-term project since I tackled one wall at a time. Last summer I had finally figured out a way to paint over the ugly wall paper. So, now there was just one corner left to paint, which was behind our entertainment center. So, following my decluttering of the DVD's in the entertainment center, I told myself that it was time to finally move the big old heavy entertainment center so that I could complete my painting project. I've been working on that and hope to finish it up this weekend. However, if you give me a paintbrush, chances are I'll begin another painting project before the first one is finished. And that's exactly what happened. I discovered I had enough primer to begin painting the ugly faux wood paneling on the outside of our sunporch. So, now I have two painting projects that I'm hoping to finish soon. That will likely be the next blog entry. Happy Spring cleaning/painting/gardening everyone! May it be magical!
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