Ryan Petty
Q1: How—exactly—does your tidying-up
advice for Americans differ from that of Marie Kondo’s? Anything more you can
tell us about this?
A:
If your household is as simple as that of an apartment with a small on-premises
storage locker (included in your rent), I would follow Marie Kondo’s
advice, more or less as written in the English language translation of her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
If,
on the other hand, you live in a house of more than 1500 square feet and you’ve
lived there for several years, and a place that once seemed big enough but is now
overflowing with your possessions, I’d depart from her advice, not so much to change it as to add to it. I’d do a custom decluttering plan that considers the
following:
Decluttering in America vs. Japan
1.
You can add a
major garage sale or professionally run estate sale before beginning the formal
decluttering process. Capture the cash you generate and hold onto it until
properly deployed in a financial plan.
2.
You can do a
room-by-room, storage space by storage space decluttering to remove the first
50% of your clutter… before going through the category-by-category analysis
advocated by Marie Kondo. This avoids
the time and logistical challenges of pulling categories together in one place and
holding individual items in your hands as you look for those that provide you
some special spark of joy. Not that the spark
of joy idea is a bad one, but it’s inefficient and probably not necessary
for getting rid of the first half of your clutter.
3.
Because you
are not trying to be comprehensive, you can handle the first round of
decluttering fast. Save the harder decisions for the KonMari Method of the second round.
4.
As you go
room-by-room, you can identify those categories in which you own many more
possessions than Marie Kondo or anyone could have anticipated. Add such
categories to the five she identifies (clothing, books, paper, mementos, and
miscellany). Dispose of the obvious clutter from your personal categories and
save the rest, pending the category-by-category review outlined by Marie Kondo.
(You can, if you like, do this for her five categories, as well.)
5.
After you’ve
applied the KonMari Method but before you’ve finally disposed of the second
half of your clutter, you can quickly do one more room-by-room, storage space
by storage space review. You want your rooms to end up looking right,
particularly if you will be staying in your current home. You want them to
function right, particularly if you will be taking on new functionality [as in
using part of your home for an Airbnb guest room(s)]. And you may identify a storage shed (no
longer needed and free-standing, not tied to your property) that can be listed
for sale on CraigsList.
6.
Before the
final disposal of the remnants of your clutter, you can consider whether you
want to hold another garage sale or contract an estate sale professional. Decluttering
a major household can take six months. Consider holding such event as you start
and again, six months later, as you finish the process. In each case, the
unsold items can then be donated, recycled, or, as necessary, disposed of as
trash.
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