Last year, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up took over America by storm, and with the release of her newest book, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up, once again she’s taken over (what’s left of) our bookshelves. Since spring has arrived and “spring cleaning” lingers over our heads, we at Barn & Willow decided to check out her advice.
Kondo simplifies her eponymous KonMari (aka her tidying method) into seven basic principles:
- Visualize your life.
- Schedule the time for KonMari.
- Tidy all at once.
- Sort by category, not location
- Does this item “Spark Joy?”’
- Honor the discarded.
- Find a home for everything.
Over the next few days, I’m going to document my experience cleaning the KonMari way.
Follow along with me on the Barn & Willow blog, as I work toward tidying up my bedroom… we’ll see how it goes!
Visualize the Destination
Today it's all about step one: visualize the destination.
Now, though the wording of this first step does seem a bit New Agey, once Kondo describes it, it actually makes quite a bit of sense.
Think of her method as a sort of itinerary. If you don’t have a destination, how are you going to come up with a travel plan?
Visualizing the destination isn’t as simple as saying, “I want to live a beautiful life in a clean house.” This is too broad and as a result, one might end up losing their way. If it’s too difficult to come up with specific terminology, create a mood board (you can follow along with mine here on Pinterest), with images of the sort of home and rooms that you’d like to live in. From there, see what these images have in common, and come up with a sentence that describes your ideal "destination."
images from stadshem, sfgirlbybay, homeyohmy
images from As for me, you can see that all these images look quite similar. My ideal bedroom destination would be a simple, minimalistic space, with a comfortable bed, and a clean desk to work on. No extraneous items litter the floor or clutter the desks, and everything has its own place.
Have you tried the KonMari method? What does your destination look like? Let us know in the comments.
Want to update your rooms for spring?
