Sunday 20 March 2016

Channelling my inner Marie Kondo...

Only those who've been living, not under a rock as such, but maybe on a nice remote island with no internet, can have missed Marie Kondo. Her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying has been all over everything recently. I don't have a copy myself but am led to believe the idea is that you get rid of everything you don't use on a daily basis or is totally wonderful and/or makes your space beautiful (so a little like William Morris). However I'm not entirely sure I've fully grasped how ruthless she is, and I'm pretty sure it's not for me - I'm more maximalist than minimalist...

The house is looking minimal by our standards at the moment though as we had a massive clear out. It's sort of still ongoing - once one room looks great the mess in the others tends to look worse so you get inspired. We started with the bathroom where we discovered products which were 9 years out of date (we've been in the house for less than 6 so that means we moved with them... why????) and Mr M concocted what can only be described as his own version of George's Marvellous Medicine as we did our best to empty everything out and recycle all of the packaging. The bathroom is now practically empty, but you know I have everything I need. Funny that.

I then moved on to my dressing table - the rest of the bedroom was OK (and I did my wardrobe a few weeks ago), but I still found plenty of other bits to add to the bucket and the recycling. And look, I found a dressing table under it all!


Found lots of jewellery I'd forgotten I had too....

This all felt very nice but there was one elephant of a room in the house - it was driving Mr M and I nuts... The living room/playroom. The only room with a TV and the comfiest sofa, totally surrounded by heaps of plastic toys and a complete mess. So we decided to go to IKEA (as you do on a Sunday afternoon).


So yes, another Kallax shelving unit, but a small one, tucked into the corner of the room. Several items moved to the little mans bedroom and others went to the charity shop, but after that we got most of his toys into this. I'm so happy I can't put it into words. So Marie must be right, it is life changing?!


Decided to take the opportunity to chuck out the filthy old cushions and do the sofa revamp too. I'd planned to wait until I've finished my needlepoint, but as I'm only just over half way through, it'll be months, so in the meantime I went with this. The green and orange cushion on the left is one the little man choose in IKEA a few months ago. Pink one in front by yours truly, jammy dodger from Nikki McWilliams and the gorgeous square cushion on the right bought a couple of years ago from Rachel Parker

I've subsequently sorted out my studio (long overdue) and started on the spare bedroom/loft/general dumping ground upstairs. We've got rid of a fair amount of baby stuff recently but there's still a lot up there...

The next thing I know I'm standing in WH Smith looking for Marie Kondo's book, and I realised that by buying it I'll go completely against the whole idea of decluttering! So I haven't. Fairly sure it'll just make me feel bad as I won't be able to live up to her standards (and I'm not sure I want to). But I'm fairly sure that a tidy home can be life changing.

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