Project 333 has gotten me pretty addicted to cleaning and simplifying, so when I saw this quarter’s Tranquility Du Jour Book Club pick, I grabbed a copy from the library and devoured it. Sort of. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has a lot of great information in it. It really does. But oh my is it repetitive. But, it’s well laid out with headers and lots of highlighting, which makes it really easy to skim.

A lot of what she talks about, getting rid of what you don’t need, is what’s fueled my current clean-out. But she takes it a step further and says to only keep items that actually bring you joy. That’s kind of huge. If you’re indifferent, you don’t need it.

The most intriguing section of the book for me was about how to fold your clothes. Yes, I know I’m a nerd. But it’s pretty revolutionary: you fold everything so it stands on the side. You don’t stack anything, so you can always see everything you have. When I was putting our laundry away yesterday, I gave it a try. (Here’s a bunch of videos about how to do it.)

Hosiery

Workout clothes

Tops

Pajama & lounge wear drawer

I must admit, it didn’t take that long to get the clothes looking like this, and now that I’ve got this much empty space, it’s kind of tempting to go shopping. (I won’t, I’m just saying…)

I promise not to blog about this much more, but it’s been pretty exciting to see how much easier it is to keep the house clean and find what I need when I need it. I’ve got two more bags of stuff sitting by the back door waiting to be donated, my “random but not junk” drawer in the kitchen is organized for the first time ever. I took two evenings and skimmed through two years worth of magazines, ripped out what I wanted to read (a total of 5 articles) and sent the rest, four grocery bags worth, to the recycling. (We also learned that Mpls/St. Paul Magazine and Minnesota Monthly are basically the same, except MN Monthly mentions Brainerd and Duluth once each issue.)