Finishing off Step 2

While we’re gone, our family will be renting out our house to help make ends meet. When we do rent it out, we will be using the crawl space to keep all the things we own for the year. The last thing I want to do is rent out a storage unit to hold all the stuff we have. Who knew my solution would be as easy as watching some TV! If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, what are you waiting for?

Marie Kondo’s ideology has been fantastic to help us reduce what we own. Her advice to only keep things that “spark joy” is so simple, and yet, extremely effective. When we first started purging things I was able to reduce my wardrobe significiantly. After I watched an episode of Tidying Up, I realized that there was plenty of other clothes I was holding onto out of guilt. This couldn’t been any clearer to me than one t-shirt I had in my closet. I kept it because Charo bought it for me. Never wore it, and I can safely say I was never going to wear it. I can safely say I kept it out of guilt! Well, so long to that and several other pieces of clothing. Charo has been inspired by this show as well. She’s been accessing all the clothing in her wardrobe, and she has helped the kids as well. It’s pretty ridiculous how many clothes we have collected as a family and we don’t really need. The only family member who has not fully embraced this yet is Mateo, but we’re all working on him.

If you have kids, definitely let them watch this as well. We watched two episodes with the kids, hand selected ones of course that had children in them, and the result has been better than expected. When we were going through the clothes Daniela took great joy in thanking all of her clothes for their service. In fact, when she forgot to she opened up the bag they were in and said “thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Can you believe there was no room in there before?

The largest surprise to me was Marco’s take on this whole Tidying up thing. At first, he was reluctant to get rid of things, until he saw Daniela’s room take shape. If you see the picture above, Daniela has a little hiding spot now. That was the hook for Marco. He started organizing, and dismissing things he did not need or would not use in the future. Last week, I couldn’t walk in his room without fear of stepping on Lego, and today he has a lot of space, and everything has it’s spot.

I guess organizing is easy when you know how

In fact, Marco also decided that he wanted to do all the folding for his drawers.

Marco did it all!

If you do attempt to do something like this, remember it takes time. We’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks now. Step one and two are completed for everyone with the exception of Mateo. We’ve gotten rid of and organized our clothes and have have thanked many a book for its service. Everyone was allowed to keep a few books and has their own box to keep their books in. onto step 3, organizing documents.

Mateo’s books

Hopefully, we can be onto step 4, household miscellanious stuff, by the weekend.

For many people it’s just about decluttering. For us, it’s about decluttering and packing things away in the near future. That crawl space we have all of a sudden is looking a little larger. Thanks Marie Kondo for helping out our family.

Thanks for reading and Happy adventuring!