Organizing Asheville Through the “…Magic of Tidying Up”

Recently I read a book by Marie Kondo called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have been organizing professionally since 2014, but personally for over 20 years. I was so impressed with the book that I redid my all my clothes, my books and am working on my papers. The major point that Marie wrote about is that you want to feel joy in everything that you own. She calls it getting the “spark of joy” with each object that you hold. It’s not so much about what you are discarding, but what you want to keep. It’s a whole new dynamic to the way I will be looking at organizing. Of course you want to keep what you love, but organizing has always been about what you discard, not so much looking at it the other way around. How exciting!

I’m not quite going by the process Marie Kondo calls the “KonMarie” method because she considers doing the whole tidying process pretty much, as one major event.  I can get the benefit of doing it this way, but not everyone can really do it as one event. I can see doing it in increments, but still staying within the categories as Marie subscribes, which is how I did my clothes and then my books and now my papers. I have too much going on to be able to take the time to do everything at once, but that I did what I did, was quite substancial and very gratifying.

The KonMarie method  has the organizing or “tidying” as she calls it, accomplished by doing it in categories. The categories are done by doing the clothes first because this really is the easiest and the one you can move through the fastest, then doing books, papers, miscellaneous, and last of all the sentimental things that you own. This will usually take the longest because we tend to stop and study, while looking at things, and then remembering the places and then the people that you had very memorable experiences with.

I’ve already talked about this method to potential clients that I went to see at a retirement community. One of the methods Marie uses for clothes is the way she folds them. I was so excited that with this method that I took some clothes to a talk I was doing there to show the women at the event how to fold the clothes to be put into their drawers. The talk didn’t materialize because the times were switched on their calendars, but the few women that did show up wanted me to show them the technique. You can see what some of it looks like here.

I’ve put in some photos that I took of my drawers after the folding method and a couple of pictures of the pile of clothes that I took out of my closets and the pile that I took out to discard. I’d gone through my clothes already a couple times this year and was surprised by how many I still had that I was ready to let go of to donate to Brother Wolf, our local animal shelter thrift
shop.