Organise Your Wardrobe: Spark Joy by Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo has been everywhere recently with her Netflix series, but I first discovered her methods a few years ago when I was sent one of her books. When I first read what it was about – an illustrated guide to de-cluttering and organising your home - I thought it was ridiculous! But I was singing a different tune after I put it to good use one rainy Saturday afternoon…

Marie Kondo’s advice on how to organise your possessions and create space in every room in the house (starting with your clothes) stems from the simple idea that a tidy home can be magical. Her methods have been growing in popularity over the last few years and she now has a Netflix show called Tidying Up With Marie Kondo where she helps put her methods into practice with particularly messy families.

The philosophy in Spark Joy (Marie’s second book) is to declutter and discard, she teaches that if an item does not bring you joy you should let it go. I put this method to the test when I first got the book and it was incredibly therapeutic to systematically go through all my clothes, hold each item and ask myself “Does this give me joy?” Every time the answer was no, the item went in the donate-to-charity pile.

The book recommends organising your wardrobe, so you can see everything you have easily, which means you don’t need to rummage around trying to find things as this creates mess. Kondo recommends a special way of folding and storing garments (see illustrations), and to pack them into drawers vertically, rather than flat folding and stacking them one on top of the other. This really works, my whole system has changed, and I love it!

Marie also differentiates between cleaning and tidying: cleaning is environmental, where tidying is actually the mess that you’ve made. Like when you keep buttons and bits and pieces like that, that you never ever use, but for some reason you’ve held onto them. It’s habits like these that she encourages you to break.

Another tip of hers is to tidy everything in one go – bring all your clothes from everywhere in the house into one room. Although I got bored after a while, I really found that this helped, tidying everything at once is the only way to get it done. Tidying bits at a time never works for me, it doesn’t allow me to appreciate the work gone into making my home a neat and organised place.

It is a super fun process and it really does… spark joy.


Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo, available now


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