Marie Kondo Your Mobile Home in Six Steps

With the holidays behind us, a new year offers the perfect time to get your home in order. While cleaning up from family gatherings and putting away your holiday decorations, you may realize you have several items that you no longer use. If you live in a tiny home where space is at a premium, it’s all the more important to let go of items that you no longer need. This article will provide some tips for doing just that, using the popular method designed by Marie Kondo.

If you have not seen the Netflix series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” consider watching it for your next TV binge. The series showcases Marie Kondo, “tidying expert” and author of four organizing books. Her goal is to “spark joy in the world through tidying,” using the KonMari Method. The method takes a minimalist style approach to cleaning up by focusing on categories of items, and not room-by-room.

Following these six simple rules of the KonMari Method will help you when deciding what to keep and what to discard or donate.

Rule #1: Commit Yourself to Tidying Up

Once you decide to tidy up your home, you must commit to it. Set a realistic deadline for cleaning through your clutter, and promise yourself a non-material reward for reaching your goal, such as a mani-pedi or a movie date with friends.

Rule #2: Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle

Think about what kind of house you want to have and how you want to live. Ask yourself why you want to tidy and how it will affect your lifestyle for the better once you have finished.

It helps to visualize the end result, so why not sketch out your ideal home or create a collage from photos in magazines or online?

Rule #3: Finish Discarding First

A big reason why tidying up never seems to last is because people do not get rid of anything. Your house may look clean and neat externally but if you have just stored everything in a new location, the cycle of getting messy and needing to tidy again will just continue.

Once you have discarded any unnecessary items then you can continue with the process and organize what you have kept.

Rule #4: Tidy by Category, Not by Location

Instead of focusing on room-by-room organization, the KonMari method focuses on organizing category-by-category. This prevents you from shifting items from one room to another and not knowing exactly how much stuff you actually have. By focusing on a specific category, you can identify how much you have of that category and what you need to get rid of.

Rule #5: Follow the Right Category

The five categories to tackle are: clothes, books, papers, Komono (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items, and they must be tackled in this order. Following the order is crucial; it helps you maintain focus on one category and saves the items that are harder to let go of – such as old sentimental objects and pictures – for last.

When tackling your clothing, it may be helpful to watch Marie Kondo’s Basic Folding Method video. This ensures you will be making the most of your space while still being able to easily identify what is stored where.

Rule #6: Ask Yourself if it Sparks Joy

This is Marie Kondo’s most important rule, and is the essence of the KonMari method. Look at each item you have, hold it, and ask yourself, “Does it spark joy?” If an item makes you feel a spark of happiness, then you keep it. If the item doesn’t give that feeling or you hesitate, then it is time for you to let it go.

Marie Kondo-ing your home is a great way to start the new decade. Keeping what sparks joy, and tossing what does not, will lift a weight off of your shoulders and create a more positive space for you to relax and enjoy in the year ahead.

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At Harmony Communities, we feel strongly that each resident has a sense of home. That they come home from work and feel pride in their environment and in their place in the greater community. That families are comfortable raising children in our neighborhoods, and that couples and singles know that they belong to something bigger than their four walls. In other words, we seek to create harmony within each community, making our communities not just passable, but peaceful, safe, functional, and beautiful.