My bedroom is not.

I’m in the middle of organizing the house using the KonMarie method. If you haven’t read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, the essence of her method is simple.

1. Touch each item.
2. Does it give you joy? Keep it.
3. No joy? Toss.

Wonderfully easy in concept.

Incredibly time-consuming in practice.

I own thousands of items. I’m on week three of trying to touch each item I own. I’m not even close to halfway done.

Have you ever taken a suitcase and overfilled it? Then added a little more stuff and sat on the lid to get it zipped close? That is what I did with my closet over the past 16 years.

I only dared to open the door a crack to prevent all the stuff from tumbling out and knocking me over like a stuff tsunami.

Last weekend I decided I would work on the closet as part of the tidying order. I’m in the komono (miscellany) section. I steeled my nerves and drank pure espresso to get energized enough to attempt this kind of life-changing magic.

I took everything out of the closet. It took hours.

An hour in, I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it. I endured. I schlepped out boxes of wires, photos, baby clothes (my son is 19), enough coats to cover a small foreign army and bank statements from the 1990s.

The bank statements are especially curious because we moved into the house in 2000. This means I moved old bank statements into the house.

shaking my head

Somehow I got everything out of the closet.

I viewed the stuff stacked in the bedroom. I was shocked to see how much stuff I had packed in that small closet!

This weekend is the “touch each item stranded in the bedroom now and decide if it brings me joy” project.

Is there hope for me? Or has my bedroom turned into a storage shed forever? Will I be over-caffeinated in my attempts?

Stay tuned ‘til next week!