7 Valuable Decluttering Lessons by Marie Kondo That Will Transform Your Home.

The process of decluttering your home and figuring out what to do with all your stuff can easily become an overwhelming experience. Japanese organising consultant, author, and decluttering guru, Marie Kondo, has recently taken Netflix by storm with her approach to tidying up. She encourages audiences to organise their homes (and lives!) with minimal hassle, and reveals how to declutter as effectively and efficiently as possible. We’ve put together a list of Marie’s top tips for decluttering and taken a look at how they make the road to minimalism a whole lot more achievable!

Respect Your Home and Belongings

When your home is messy and disorganised, you’re much more likely to lose track of the items you own and their utility. Marie emphasises the importance of taking the time to recognise the role your belongings play in your life; thank them for the services they provide and how they’ve made your life easier in the time that you’ve had them. That way, when it comes to saying goodbye to the items you no longer want or need, you can do so with a lot less guilt and hesitance.

Get Ready to Tackle Categories - Not Rooms

Instead of decluttering room by room, Marie recommends doing it category by category. Starting with the least sentimental categories - like clothing - and leaving the most meaningful categories means you don’t lose motivation working through the most time-consuming items first. This will also come in handy when you want to put away items that are taking up too much space in your home but are too valuable to throw away. Keep items in the same organised categories when you put them in self storage in Sydney for later use!

Ask Yourself: “Does this spark joy?”

Once you’ve sorted your categories, it’s time to determine what sparks joy in your life. This is the main part of the decluttering process, and it’s easier than it sounds. If you haven’t reached for an item in over a year, it probably doesn’t spark true joy in your life, but it might in someone else’s life. You don’t have to throw good stuff out; self storage in Sydney gives you the option of keeping essentials that you don’t have space for safe so you can use them when you need to. Simply sell or donate the items that you’re ready to let go of.

Practice The Fold

Marie Kondo’s upright method of folding makes everything easy to find and put back; not to mention, it looks so much neater. To keep your folded clothes standing vertically in their drawers, Marie recommends using shoe boxes as dividers. Check out her folding technique here and practice, practice, practice.

Visualize Your Destination as Vividly as Possible.

Before you start the decluttering process (before you even separate items into categories), envision the lifestyle you want to live and ask yourself why you want to live that way. The more specific this vision is, the better. This step is extremely important as it gives you a solid, realistic goal to achieve and a vivid reminder of why you’re decluttering to begin with so that you’ll be motivated to continue even when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Organise Your Kitchen By Ease of Cleaning.

Marie believes that the key to success when it comes to decluttering your kitchen is to organise it based on ‘ease of cleaning’, not ‘ease of use’. To do this, she suggests putting as little as possible around the sink and on the counters so that cooking is neater and simpler. In turn, the cleaning process is made easier as well and you’re less likely to re-clutter your cooking space.

Take Before & After Pictures

Taking before and after pictures to document your success will give you additional motivation to avoid falling back into habits and serve as a reminder of your home’s transformation potentials. Marie, who regularly posts before and after pictures on her own instagram account, recognises how much of a difference that “the sense of accomplishment” can make in cementing your success. Sharing your progress with friends and family might even encourage others to take the leap and start their own decluttering journeys - so give it a go! If you’re thinking of decluttering and would like to know more about how self storage in Sydney can help, contact Rhodes Self Storage today!