You know the house drill. It is Saturday morning and you are pumped up to get your home in order. All it takes is … well … let’s have you think on that while go back under your bedcovers …
7 things I THOUGHT a well-organized home required before konmari:
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More house rules. Think about the last time you had a boss who continually changed his or her expectations of your work. Yeah, that’s the one. Frustrating, right? In some ways, we home managers create those same frustrations at home with our family and housemates. We call it life training but in reality, we develop complex and ever-changing ways in which our family can help us maintain our homes. “I work so hard at it so obviously this mess is because no one else does their chores around here …Wait! I have an idea! I will make yet another chore chart!”
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Less time with people, both within the house and going out. See also #4. You find yourself immersed in deep-cleaning a room so you decline an invitation out. “Hiking? Waterskiing? A museum? No, I couldn’t possibly go. I need to clean out my basement during my vacation.” This could turn into declining a cruise or a trip to Paris. Well, maybe not that … but enough of the smaller adventures that make up the bulk of living.
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A stringent weekly housekeeping schedule. You resolve to vacuum every Tuesday, clean out your fridge on Fridays, and so on. There will be NO evenings where you sit idle, because you are going to harvest every moment to whip your place into shape. I feel you. I had whiteboards filled with to-do lists that started off with the words “clean floors” and then “laundry”, like these are something that needed to take up calendar time and headspace. These weekly routines seem like a great idea, don’t they? The lists start like many of our New Year’s resolutions: sky-high aspirations which are dashed in Week #2 when real life intervenes. The schedule also hides the true culprit of the mess: clutter. How often did I vacuum or dust around piles and then wonder why my house does not look any better for my efforts?
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More time spent at home *pout* “Everyone gets to have fun except for me because I have to do such-and-such organizing …”. When your home is chronically disheveled with stuff, the job of keeping house means staying home to tend to it. So, like #2, you see people less and you describe yourself as a homebody. In truth, you are staying home to re-arrange your piles and to wonder why nothing improves.
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Doing the ‘dirty work’ all the time. You feel like every household chore is beneath you, yet needs to be done. Even in a household of evenly-distributed chores, you are still trying to delegate your tasks to someone else, usually someone younger than you or someone who is your offspring. And when I say you, I mean me. *sniffing* “Well, no one has clean underwear because my time is FAR MORE VALUABLE than to spend 4 minutes folding those. Just dig through the pile over there in front of the TV …” You simmer in resentment that the bathroom floor is only Swiffered by you, rather than realize the effort takes about 90 seconds to do. And if anyone (whose own chores are completed) dares to watch a movie or play video games while you work, that simmer of resentment turns into an unwarranted-yet-dramatic rolling boil.
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Expensive professional closet organizing systems “Oooooooh, organizing would be so easy if I had that galfa/Carolina-closet system in every bedroom.” If I could, I would make the word storage an unmentionable word. An ongoing myth is that there are enough storage solutions out there for any discontent you have with your home. We all know that, but we all perpetuate the myth anyway. When you hear yourself say “I need storage”, replace the word storage with the word imagination. Then dive into whatever home problem you see with a new perspective: that you can solve this by having fewer well-chosen things, not by getting more drawers, baskets, shelves, boxes and racks.
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Squirreling away the mess somewhere and hoping no one notices. Saying “Here, I will just buy five more Rubbermaid bins …” is your key indicator that you’ve become a human squirrel. Before konmari, my home was stacked with plastic bins, sometimes 5 to 7 bins high. Closets, the attic, the garage … they were just there to hold mystery bins of whatever-that-was. At its core, this squirreling practice meant large parts of my home were unusable. Not a tidy home like I was pretending to have, but a useless one filled with unseen stuff and junk.
How wrong I was.
None of these assumptions on a tidy home is true. I have no chore charts, no expensive storage solutions, no excessive boxes and bins. Also, I have no need to resent everyone else’s free time because now I have mine too. I have more time with people. I could easily spend less time in my home if I wanted.
My konmari removed all the clutter and gave places for everything that remains. That was most of the housework battle in a tidy home. For the rest — the vacuuming and wiping down and restocking — I take care of those when I notice the need. I don’t need to schedule a quick sweep of the porch … I just do it when I notice it needs to be done. Everything is completed quickly because all my cleaning tools are in their places.
Maria Leahey, Tidiness Coach 