A little over a year ago, I started my 4th KonMari tidy just to go through the process with you, dear reader, on this blog. The experience turned out to actually be quite useful, since we’d moved the year before, and making sure things were in order helped me feel more prepared for our new baby. Now that I’m a year out from the start of that experience, though I wanted to share my vision.
When you read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo says the first thing you should do is create a goal for your home. It cannot be ‘to be tidy’. Instead, it’s supposed to reflect the lifestyle, and vibe that you want from your space.
Here’s what was important to me:
- having a home that was relatively simple visually (as opposed to busy, with lots going on), and uncluttered
- our home being down to the essentials enough that housework would be less of a chore
- having less stuff to take care of, in general
With those goals in mind, as well as the home I have, I came up with this tidying goal:
a clean, verdant space with plenty of room to play, and enjoy family time
To me, this statement suggests a level of simplicity that allows our home to feel open and usable for everyone together, despite none of the rooms being very big. Also, there’s a huge focus on streamlining so that there’s more togetherness, and less actual cleaning that needs to be taken care of. In fact, it was that latter bit that actually kickstarted my desire to remove excess art from my walls, and have simpler storage furniture with less to dust.
I wrote down my vision, and I got to work. A year later…I’m pretty happy with the results! We have changed a lot of the furniture in our space to meet my goals (for me, that meant getting furniture on legs, so we could see if anything was under it), and have added storage (shelving) to our home to keep organized. Our space is also, like, 1,000% greener than it was this time last year with the couch, and another 9 or so plants verdant-ing up the place. To me, it feels clean, and alive, and cozy, and will only continue to become moreso as we keep working towards that vision.
Do you have a home vision? I’d love to hear it!
