My guy and I are tidying up our flat and our life. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please check out Episode 1.
Those who are here after reading Episode 1 - I tell you, the photos of our stuff will become shabbier and dustier. They're not pleasant for your eyes, only for the explanation purpose.
This series is also becoming a tour to a flat of a struggling start-up couple.
This Sunday, we tackled our second day of Kondo-ing - books, followed by documents.
Before Everything
I didn’t write this in the previous episode; actually, there was one important process we did before sorting out our stuff. It was to write down our wishes on our flat, like, what kind of place we want to live.
Oh, not about the place itself, like “a bungalow in Juhu” or “Mannat in Bandstand”, but we imagined our ideal situation inside our flat. These are our lists:
Pretty humble.
What I Did During The Week
I realised that we didn’t do bags and shoes on the first Sunday. I didn’t carry them on to the second Sunday since my guy owns very little and said he doesn’t have any to get rid of. So I quickly did them alone.
As for shoes, I threw away 3 pairs. Now I have 1 rain boots, 1 high-cut sneaker, 1 normal sneaker, 1 festive chappal, 1 sandal, and 1 chappal.
* The ones for styling idea blogs are not included. They're my "work tools".
As for the bags, what I had are these:
The pink porch my friend gave me became a bag for valuables, and the rest of the heap became like this:
Basic! They all fit inside this bag. I don’t know where to keep this yet.
Also I had this suitcase which I kept:
And got rid of this dirty piggy bag:
Then my guy said he wants it to store his “borrowed materials” for his work. So it went to him.
Category 2 For This Sunday: Books
On the second Sunday, we decided to do Category 2 and 3 - books, then documents.
Now my guy starts, ‘I don’t throw away any of my books! All my books are for reference for my work!’.
He didn’t even open his “kuch kuch” bags up there including his books. He likes to put things “up there” and happily forget about them! Sigh...
But again, I didn’t say anything, following Marie Kondo’s words not to poke nose into the family member’s tidying up.
So no work for him on the second category apparently. He moved to his documents which gave him quite a work. On the contrary, my documents are neatly stored in two grey folders and were quite easy to be sorted. All our documents are these:
He was clearly not enjoying sorting out his documents. Of course, it's not a fun task for anyone:
While he was struggling with his docs, I was going through all my books. I had this much books:
Apart from these, I have some on my bedside table. These are the ones I am reading/in the queue (the red one is a dictionary). Obviously they stay there.
My books consist of:
- The textbooks/references for making clothes
- The textbooks/dictionaries of Hindi
- Other technical books
- Hobbies
- Fictions/Non-fictions
I check the first bunch very often, but to other bunches I hardly go back. I kept the first two bunches and removed a lot from the rest. The ones I kept are this much:
And all of them happily fit on the tiny shelf. I might move them since this place would get lots of dust very quickly…
Marie Kondo says that many people try to tidy up their house at the end of the year every year and they never finish, just because they do cleaning at the same time. According to her, tidying up and cleaning are two different things. Cleaning should be done only after tidying up.
So we’re not cleaning the places till we finish tidying up. That's why (yes, that's why!) I left all these places not really neat and clean... yeah, these are just temporary.
And my ideal decoration would gradually take place only after cleaning. So, you can ignore the lousy newspaper and all!
And these are the books I got rid of. I will send photos of the books to ThriftWaale to find happy owners.
Category 3 For This Sunday: Documents
My guy spent some time to sort out his documents, and I went through my two files for a minute. After sorting out our documents, it looked like this:
Actually, there’s another big heap on my guy’s desk. He again insisted that these docs on his desk are all references and he doesn’t want to throw away ANYTHING:
Yeah, he’s like this, hahaha... I'm pretty sure they're not organised, but he didn’t even touch them. Sigh… But I didn’t say anything.
And yes, Marie Kondo’s right. I found some more docs of mine which I kept in another place. So actually my docs were this much:
But it didn’t take me much time to sort them anyway.
Japanese Animism And Marie Kondo
This is a tiny thought about Marie Kondo.
- She suggests to thank the going-away stuff for helping you till now. Following that, my guy and I said “thank you” “thank you” to everything we decided to get rid of.
- She also goes to a Japanese Shinto shrine before any big jobs. She loves shrines too much that she even has done a part-time job as a Miko, or female attendant at a shrine.
- She is famous for taking a moment to “greet” the house first every time she goes to someone’s house for consultation. And she claps hands over the things her client gathered in one place, to “wake them up”.
It seems that she has awe for “multitudinous gods”, Japanese Animism as a primitive belief which you normally see in your grannies.
I have read an article which even analysed these things as Marie Kondo's great marketing strategy to give an "oriental" "spiritual" image for the overseas market!
Miko dress like this
Wrap Of The Second Day
We didn’t feel ‘yeeeey’ so much this time since the books and documents were not really occupying too much space in our flat. I guess it was pretty boring for you to look at, too…
Next Sunday would be a big day with the overwhelming "miscellaneous things" category aka "everything else in the flat". Stay tuned for the third Sunday!
Bonus Video
When I searched on Youtube for videos on Marie Kondo from India, I found some. But most of them looked like how-to tips and very partial tidying-up (e.g. only clothes, only kitchen, only folding).
Also, I gradually realised that most of the videos on Marie Kondo (from any parts of the world) are by women. Men just cooperate in tidying up, or don't appear at all. Yes, so as in my flat.
Among those, I found this video by Buzzfeed India where a boy is tidying up his stuff. I enjoyed watching the interaction of him and his family.
If you live with your parents who're not ready to do Konmari Method in the entire house, you can start with your stuff like he did.