Big Clean 2015: Day Three – Finding My Moment of Zen

Inspired by Gretchen Rubin and Marie Kondo, my husband and I embarked on a three-day “staycation” and did the KonMari method on our home.  Read here about our Planning,  Day One, and Day Two.

When Bookworms Marry

I told John we could spend ONE HOUR going through books.  John had absorbed Marie Kondo’s admonishment to release books that you’ve enjoyed back into the universe to bless others.  We have four large bookshelves in the living room, plus three shelves of cookbooks, plus two shelves of children’s books in Henry’s room.  We also found three boxes of books just hanging around in corners while we were cleaning. And there are more older children’s books in the basement, but the basement was not on the plan for this mission.

We each picked a shelf to sift, pulling out books that belonged to us that we were willing to give away.  We inevitably found duplicates of some plays, theater textbooks, and novels. Some books were clearly impulse purchases from Half Price Books that were the literary equivalent of six-month-old popcorn.  I also pulled some books that I thought John SHOULD give away and set them in separate stacks for his review.  This probably added significant time (and irritation) to the task, but we did get rid of more books that way.

The most fun was going through the more than two hundred children’s books, many from John’s childhood.  We kept far more of these that we needed.  It was also very satisfying to finally separate out all the board books and load up the shelf in Paige’s room.

By Noon (three hours later), we’d sorted out TEN BOXES of books to drive to the local library, plus THREE MORE BOXES of theater books to donate to a local college theater program.  In spite of this, every shelf we have is still full. We don’t have boxes of books hiding in corners, or books stacked on top of other books, but still… all the shelves are full.  I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Zen and the Art of Tidying Up

Once we had piled all the books that we were giving away, John asked if he could spend an hour culling items from the kitchen while I worked on packing up books.

Rebecca (Out Loud): Okay, but just an hour, we still have to get all this stuff in the living room tidied up.

Rebecca (Internal Monologue): AARRGH!  WHY IS MY HUSBAND AVOIDING THE REAL WORK OF CLEANING UP HIS NEST OF PAPERS???  HOW ARE WE EVER GOING TO FINISH??

Around 11 AM, I broke into slightly hysterical giggles in the solarium as I was emptying a cardboard box of baby clothes into a plastic trash bag so that we could use the box to pack up more books.  Surrounded by a mountain of our things, I could feel the minutes left to reach my dream of a clean house slipping away.  That was the height of my panic.

However, while I was panicking, John was applying his slow, methodical process to the giant shelf in our kitchen that was overstuffed with various small appliances, bakeware, cookie cutters, holiday serving dishes, etc.  As he covered the floor of the kitchen with more and more small items, I kept looking frantically for more boxes and space in the solarium. I know the KonMari method is all about putting everything on the floor so you can see how much you have, but that part of the process just wigged me out.  I hate walking around piles of stuff — it makes me feel like we are living in an episode of Hoarders.  I had to fight the urge to make comments while John painstakingly figured out what he wanted and what he didn’t.

When he was done though, something amazing happened. He had cleared one entire shelf and made space for all the cookbooks that had been in the Nest in the living room into the kitchen.  This freed up space in the Nest shelves for expand-a-files, which, in theory, could keep the Nest cleaner.  I’m not sure that an outsider would have seen the difference; the giant shelf is still completely full.  But the things on it are all items we actually use, they all can be seen and accessed easily, and look orderly instead of cramped.  Two months later, this is still a significant upgrade to life in the kitchen. 

I decided to try and adopt some of my husband’s Zen attitude as I worked on clearing toys from the living room. I gathered one large box of baby toys and puzzles no one was playing with anymore.  My goal was to shift enough of Henry’s “big kid” toys upstairs that no toys would have to live on the living room floor anymore.  Hauling the giant collection of wooden blocks up the stairs took several hot, exhausting trips.  But, I got a great deal of satisfaction in figuring out how to stack them in two shelves of the closet, tetris-style.

I also got to whittle down collections of plastic junk, gimcracks and other things that kids accumulate from birthday parties and Happy Meals.  Parents, can we all agree to stop giving the kids little pieces of plastic junk in birthday party guest bags? Let’s just hand them each a candy bar and call it a day.  Also, I sorted our 43 tubs of Play-Doh by color and selected 20 tubs to give away. How did we get 43 tubs of Play-Doh? I think they’ve been breeding.

Getting one layer of toys, art supplies and other kid stuff out of the living room made an enormous difference.  I also got to put up some of Henry’s best art from the summer in his room, which really made it feel like his own special spot.

I got behind the couch and found all the things we’d dropped back their since 2012. I recycled stacks of Real Simple magazines that I was saving for reasons that seem utterly ridiculous in the face of the existence of the internet.  I emptied both medicine cabinets.  In the downstairs cabinet, I discovered that nearly every OTC medication in it was expired. Great! More room to contain the little things we use everyday that get all over the bathroom counter.

I could feel it working.  The house looked better and better.  But as we reached five o’clock and quitting time, I knew I was going to have to dig deep and find more hours over the weekend if we were to have house ready on Monday for the cleaning crew of former nurses that I’d hired.

Getting My Second, Third, and Fourth Wind

The weekend brought our delightful children home.  Henry loved his new room and spent an hour upstairs during quiet time drawing at his new desk. Paige loved getting her books off the shelf in her room and running the length of the living room with her toy stroller.  Seeing how happy the extra space made them helped me keep going. 

Saturday night I wandered into the kitchen and started working on the odd pie rack/plant shelf that sticks out into our solarium.  The front part of the shelf had become a dumping ground for art from Henry’s school and whatever else was in our hands that we needed to set down when we came in the door.  My goal was to get this to be a clean space that held nothing – an empty spot in a crowded room.  Getting rid of the trash and odd items took only 20 minutes or so.  Then I started paying attention to the vases and glassware that I was displaying on the other parts of the shelf.

Did I really need all those vases?  At most, I use a single vase at a time for flowers. I like having some different sizes and shapes for different kinds of arrangements, but some of these looked like duplicates.  I started pulling the pieces that didn’t spark joy and putting them aside.

Eleven superfluous vases. What the hell?  That didn’t include the eight I’d decided to keep.  How did this happen? I recognized some as leftovers from flower arrangements that I’d been sent over the years.  Without thinking, I’d added them to my “glass collection” without stopping for a moment to look at them and really asses their worth. It reminded me that as much as I give John grief for being a clutter bug, I am also guilty of hanging on to things mindlessly. Once I boxed them up, I spent another 20 minutes arranging the pieces I really love: the deep green vase from a cousin’s wedding; the bread baking bowl; the teapot from my grandmother’s German set from the 1940s.  I felt like a curator creating an exhibition. These objects might not mean anything to anyone else, but for me, they are beautiful and I love being able to really see them now. It was my moment of Zen.

Sunday morning I stayed home from church by myself and cleaned out the shelf under the sink in the downstairs bathroom while listening to the How Did This Get Made? podcast on the Howard the Duck movie.  The salty commentary about that weird, dirty movie was completely appropriate for all the junk I found down there.  I will spare everyone those details.

John and I worked in the Nest on Sunday evening, racing to be ready for the cleaning crew.  Here, I started to run out of patience.  John had been so good about letting things go: clothes, books, kitchen gadgets.  But we got stuck when we got to paper.  It wasn’t just the nostalgia items like programs and cards.  Somehow everything kept going into piles “to be filed” or “for the taxes” or “I want to look at that before  I get rid of it.” I got really frustrated.  This space has been a mess for as long as we’ve lived here.  It is a permanent collection of piles in which any number of important items are lurking among all the trash.  As I write this in the Nest, I’m still surrounded by piles.  Sure, they are tidier and, for a few weeks after the nurses came, they were even off the floor.  But now they are drifting and it makes me feel so defeated.  In the moment, that weekend, I had to let it go.  We were out of time and John had reached his limit for this project.  I had to make the effort to celebrate everything we’d accomplished and not let this one thing ruin my mood.

A New Habit

Sunday during naptime I knuckled down and did all the dishes.  Our kitchen was always full of dirty dishes, especially leftover pots and pans from John’s cooking.  I did my best to load and unload the dishwasher to keep plates and such clean, but I hate scrubbing pots and pans.  Secretly, I felt like John should have to do the pots and pans, because he made the mess while cooking. I also felt annoyed that it seemed like I ALWAYS had to do the dishes.  The only time John seemed to wash a pot was when he ran out of clean pots while cooking.  Once a week, I’d give in and do a bunch of hand dishes while seething about the state of the whole house.  If John had the misfortune to interupt me during this time, I would pick a fight with him. It sucked.

But – the dishes had to get done in order for the nurses to clean the kitchen on Monday. So, I did my best to get into Zen mode and just get it done.  And as I did, I realized several things:

1. I don’t really hate doing the dishes. I don’t like dealing with old, disgusting food.  But I like being on my feet, the warm water and suds, the sense of doing something physical.
2. It’s not fair of me to expect my husband to do all the cooking (which he does) and also do the dishes.
3. The thing that really bothered me about the dishes was when they piled up.  We enter our house through the back kitchen door and being greeted by piles of dirty dishes every day always made me feel like a failure the moment I got home.  Plus, I had to summon a lot of energy and willpower to tackle the backlog, which I never seemed to have after wrestling Paige to bed for an hour every night.

That’s when I remembered Gretchen Rubin’s brilliant observation about habits: habits allow us to make a decision ONCE and save ourselves the time and energy it takes to decide.  It came to me in a flash: I would create a new habit of doing all the dishes every night before I went to bed.  It would be my job – just as cooking was John’s job.  If I did it every single day, they’d never pile up and the job would never be too arduous to manage within 30 minutes or so. Plus, I could listen to podcasts or music while I did it and enjoy a little time to myself.

I announced this decision at dinner that evening at our weekly Family Meeting. I didn’t tell John beforehand.  I think he was a little surprised, but pleased.  I also assigned Henry the job of helping to set and clear the table.  Paige’s job, eat like a small horse, is one she relishes every night.

Since I started doing the dishes every night, the kitchen is staying cleaner, but also, I don’t do the dishes in a stew of frustration anymore.  I don’t have to summon the willpower to decide to do it.  It’s my habit — I already made the decision.  I just do the dishes and then, because I’ve been up on my feet and thinking, I often go and do something else useful instead of just lying on the couch feeling drained. Bonus, my husband has actually volunteered several times to help just so we can hang out and because he is a nice guy.  Two months later, this one small change to my habits has had a ripple effect on my mood and my productivity.

Living Life in the After Photos

Nearly two months have elapsed since the Big Clean.  Our After photos still make me very happy. I am happy to report that, for the most part, spaces that we cleared have stayed cleared/  Here are a few things we’ve observed about living in a post-KonMari world:

1. The house feels bigger. John kept saying this for several days after we cleaned. We’d forgotten just how much space we really had — it was buried under too much stuff.
2. It’s easier to keep the house clean.  First, I can see more quickly when something’s out of place and needs to be put away.  Second, I know exactly where to put that thing away because I made a space for it.  Rubin notes that putting something away in its exact place  in your home gives one “the archer’s satisfaction of hitting the mark.”
3. We didn’t need more storage; we just needed less stuff. No new storage containers were purchased for this project.  At Marie Kondo’s suggestion, I re-purposed a couple of Apple iPhone boxes and some clean plastic hummus containers.
4. It’s wonderful not having to feel embarrassed about the state of my house anymore.  My mother-in-law is visiting this weekend and I don’t feel anxious about what she’ll think of the house.
5. We still need another solution for dealing with incoming paper.  I’ll gladly take suggestions here.

Thanks to everyone who cheered us on through Facebook and read these posts.  I hope this makes my fellow clutter bugs of the world feel less alone and inspires them to try making a big change.  I also want to say thanks to my husband, who did a ton of work on this project and was kind to me in my moodiness during the Big Clean and throughout our marriage.  I’ll stop nagging you about those leftover t-shirts someday, I promise.

Big Clean 2015: Day Two – Attack of the Killer Dust Bunnies

Inspired by Gretchen Rubin and Marie Kondo, my husband and I embarked on a three-day “staycation” and did the KonMari method on our home.  Read here about our Planning and Day One.

The Linen Closet

I was determined to complete the upstairs on Day Two. Marie Kondo and my husband wanted us to go through our books, but that sounded to me like a great way to waste time dealing with objects that felt mostly contained and off the floor, while ignoring the swamp of everything else.

We decided to start with the Linen Closet.

We don’t have a linen closet. Our narrow row house built in 1910 has barely any closets at all.  The “Linen Closet” was the end of our upstairs hallway where over six years we’d attempted to contain blankets, pillows, sheets, table linens, and other soft goods in a couple of large tubs and a white bathroom shelf that had come apart into two pieces.

Here’s the BEFORE picture.  You can see there’s also a large box of children’s books in one corner and various bags all over the floor.  When I went to sift through the bags, I discovered one that was nothing but paper trash — literally, I had gathered up a bag of trash and then somehow gotten distracted and left it in the hall for months on end.

We gathered up everything and dumped it on our bed. Standing on opposite sides of the bed, we started going by category: comforters, baby blankets, sheet sets, etc.  This was one of the more fun moments of the whole process.  John and I readily agreed on what needed to stay and stuffing giant comforters into trash bags is fun.

Did we need two sets of dark red sheets? Nope.  Did either of us like the fru-fru brocade comforter with matching pillows? Nope. Were we likely to use burp cloths now that the baby was nearly two years old? Nope.

Once we narrowed it down, I found that I could fit nearly everything we used every day into the three built-in drawers in the bottom of Paige’s closet plus the one small plastic set of drawers next to her bed.

That just left our heirloom items — quilts made by my grandmother and dear friends.  John had a flash of brilliance (one of many over the next two days) and hauled the very nice looking bench that had been storing paper towels in the solarium up into the hallway.  The quilts fit perfectly and we got an amazing AFTER picture: 

Of all the spaces we cleaned, this is the one that may still be making me happiest every day.  I don’t have to squeeze by a mountain of stuff to get into my sons room.  I’ve even discovered John and Paige sitting on the bench reading a book a few times.  It’s a peaceful spot.

Attack of the Killer Dust Bunnies

High on our sense of accomplishment, we dug into finishing our bedroom.  John worked on finishing sorting his many, many t-shirts and I started throwing away all the stuff that had accumulated around our nightstands: receipts, books, scraps of paper.

I should have known better.  My dust allergy is pretty severe.  I avoid dusting for this reason, which of course, only makes the problem worse in the long run.  The dust bunnies I disturbed as I began cleaning around the night stand were not your average bunnies.  They’d had time to beef up to terrifying proportions.  Within twenty minutes, I had a severe headache.  I had been trying to avoid spending time “cleaning” to focus on “clearing”, but this was an emergency.  While I took advil, John came to the rescue with our Shark vacuum.

When he was done, he had a proposal: what if we got rid of our alarm clocks? Both were old and difficult to set, so we rarely used them. I woke up each morning to my iPhone alarm.  Plus, both were taking up valuable space on our nightstands.  “Yes!” I said enthusiastically, “Great idea!”  By lunchtime, we’d finished our room.

Making Space for Play

It was time to tackle Henry’s room.  Henry had moved into the spare room almost a year ago when Paige graduated to the crib in the nursery.  We had moved in his bed and some of his toys and books, but we hadn’t taken the time to move out all the things that had previously been stashed in this “spare room.”  My goal was to get everything out of this room that belonged to grown-ups so that the space could be entirely for Henry to play, draw, read, and do whatever a boy needs to do.

We decided to use Paige’s room as a staging area.  Hauling everything out of the closet took an hour: wrapping paper, boxes and boxes of stationary, posters and framed prints that never seem to go up on the walls, young adult books that are not right for Henry yet, John’s sewing machine and various abandoned sewing projects, markers and other adult craft supplies.

I attempted to sift and sort all this stuff while John cleaned up some of the toys and rearranged things. This might have been the most depressing stack of stuff.  So much of it was “aspirational clutter” – supplies for all sorts of projects that John and I imagined we might do before we had children.  Gretchen Rubin talks a lot about the importance of knowing oneself when it comes to building good habits and a happy life. Her secrets of adulthood “Be Gretchen” and “Just because something’s fun for everyone else, doesn’t mean it’s fun for you” really resonate with me.  I often wish that I was a crafty person who made things.  But the truth is, I just don’t get that much enjoyment out of crafting. I gladly gave away the yarn and knitting needles, but I couldn’t bear to part with all the scrapbooking supplies for our honeymoon album.  At least I got them neatly stored in a storage tub and tucked under our bed.

Once we got everything out of the closet, we were able to fit two sets of plastic drawers in side-by-side.  We didn’t buy these new — one had previously held off-season clothes of John’s, the other held sewing projects.  We had gotten rid of so many things that both were now empty and available to keep all of Henry’s clothes, which had been crammed in with Paige’s in the large chest of drawers in her room.  Plus, we now had three deep shelves in the side of the closet and a wide shelf running above the hanging rack to store toys and games.

It was time to pick up the kids from school.  We’d made enormous progress, but my anxiety was still running high.  Had we just moved everything around? Would we get through all the junk we’d just moved into Paige’s room? How in the world would we get through the entire downstairs tomorrow?  I had a minor freak-out.

John was feeling a lot more optimistic.  He also was making a push again to deal with books.  “I think we need to go back to the KonMari Method,” he insisted.  “If we get rid of books, we’ll open up space for more stuff.”  We argued about it for a bit, and reached a compromise.  John could have one hour tomorrow to do a quick sweep of books. But we had to get faster if we were going to finish everything in just one day.

The Big Clean 2015: Day One Inspires a KonMari Disciple, But I Have Doubts

Inspired by Gretchen Rubin and Marie Kondo, my husband and I took a three-day staycation to get our house in order. You can read about our preparations and planning here.

Wednesday, August 12

We got a late start. Tuesday night, the moment I opened a bottle of cider and settled into the crook of my husband’s arm on the couch, my phone rang. It was my mother. She didn’t feel right and she had convinced herself and the nurse at her specialist’s office that she needed to go the emergency room.

I’m an only child.  We moved my mother here from Colorado four years ago so that I could keep a better eye on her various health problems and help her manage her bills. She has a permanent brain injury from a fall she took roller-skating at age 48. She has a long list of other health problems. We’re up to 12 specialists in 4 years. The problems are real. She’s not a hypochondriac. But sometimes her brain injury makes it hard to discern what to do.  Part of my job is to be her higher reasoning functions when her brain is too tired or too anxious. It’s also my job to take her to the emergency room.

We got to the ER at 9 pm and left four hours later.  They ran a ton of tests, because that’s what you do when a woman in her sixties presents with general weakness and pallor. Nothing.  Nothing but the mysterious anemia she’d already been diagnosed with and was scheduled to have a special transfusion for on Friday.  She probably just overdid it earlier in the evening helping out at our church’s community meal. They sent her home with instructions to lay low.  It was both a relief and an incredibly frustrating  and familiar experience.

So… we all overslept the next morning.  John got the kids to school and by the time we both had caffeine, it was after 10 am.  I am a morning person, so I felt like we’d lost half the day. John’s a night owl, so it was about the right time for him to get going on a project.

We were determined to follow the KonMari method and purge by category, starting with clothes.  But I also had a list of spaces that I knew I wanted to clear by the end of the week:

Our bedroom – closets, nightstands, tops of dressers, floors.
Paige’s room – closets
Henry’s room – floor, closets, get everything out that doesn’t belong to him
the “linen” closet in the upstairs hallway
bathrooms – closets and medicine cabinets
kitchen – the pantry, shelves, and the “window box”
living room – toy shelves, the chair stacked with art supplies, the “Nest”

I started emptying my dresser drawers onto my bed.  John, however, took KonMari more seriously.  “She says to dump everything out onto the floor,” he reminded me.  By the time John had emptied his two closets, eight drawers, and various boxes and laundry baskets, his clothes covered every square inch of floor in our daughter’s nursery.  It was a truly astonished assortment of clothes. I retreated to the bedroom and my clothes, which I dumped onto our bed.

Ruminations on KonMari Method and Clothes

1. I will never fit into those pants again.  I have lost more than 10 lbs. recently, but it’s not enough to squish into my pre-Paige clothes. That baby permanently rearranged my flesh. I decided to release the pants and enjoy getting some new pants when I need them.  On the upside, I may finally need some smaller, more fitted shirts.
2. Security is a drawer full of clean underwear.
3. Marie’s system of folding and storing clothes is revelatory.  By storing shirts and other garments on end, side by side across the drawer, instead of in stacks,  I can see everything immediately.  Organizing by color from dark to light makes me feel like I’ve curated a little art project in my sock drawer.
4. I need more color in my main wardrobe.  I’ve got a lot of black, brown and gray.  I need more supporting pops of color.

After stuffing five trash bags of clothes, I found that all my drawers had a sudden airiness to them. Everything had room to breathe. I started making a mental list of gaps in my wardrobe that I could try to fill with Christmas gift cards.

Finishing the Hat
While emptying my closets, I found several vintage hats that I’d acquired over the years, plus a bag of hats that I’d purchased when I was in my early twenties. I love hats though I don’t often have the occasion (or the panache) to wear them.

Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration.  Kondo suggested using private spaces, like the back of one’s closet, as a place to display a few favorite personal items out of public view.  The idea reminded me of Rubin’s happiness tip of creating “shrines” – small curated displays of collections or thematically linked items that boost your happiness.  I could use the top shelf of my closet as a shrine for my vintage hats, accompanied by my best handbags.  Delighted with myself, I spent several minutes fussing with these few items in the narrow space until I had arranged them to my satisfaction.

My closet with its shrine to hats on the top shelf.

Then, I turned around and looked at the rest of the room. Frankly, it was still a disaster zone with piles of junk everywhere.  It had taken me about two hours to go through all of my clothes, but John was still completely surrounded. Rubin often notes that things get messier before they get better when clearing clutter.  Still, I started to feel very anxious.

My nightmare scenario for this project? That we’d get it only half-done. Experience had taught me that if we didn’t finish a clean-up job 100%, we were doomed.  Often, we’d get to 85% clean: everything but the last few pots and pans.  Everything except for that one pile over there.  Everything except that last leftover box.  When we ran out of time and momentum, that last 15% would become a part of the landscape. We would literally walk around it like furniture for months on end. Halfway through the first day with just one closet and some drawers organized and a giant new mess blocking access to our daughter’s crib, I suddenly felt like we were doomed to failure. What if we wound up worse than before?

Time for lunch.

Lunch and a little break with my husband calmed me down. We resolved to keep working – John would stay focused on his clothes, and I would tackle all the little piles of stuff in our bedroom.

Things Found While Cleaning Up

Most of what I picked up off the floor was junk. What kind of junk?
– Plastic collar stays for husband’s shirts
– Receipts (John has a habit of tucking receipts automatically into shirt pockets, then fishing them out when getting shirts ready to wash and leaving them in heaps near his dresser and nightstand)
– Nursing supplies (Paige has been weaned for a year)
– Playbills, flyers, ticket stubs, loyalty stamp cards, notes scrawled on the backs of envelopes
– stray buttons
– Weekend lists of things to do (on every list – “Tidy Up”)

I also found a few little treasures, like this art project from Henry’s last year of pre-school.  And the box with all my Shakespeare t-shirts from my days at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and a few other places that I intend to have made into a quilt. Items like these are what Marie Kondo refers to as “nostalgia”. Of all the categories of items in your home, she recommends purging nostalgia items at the very end.  It’s too easy to get caught up reminiscing over items and avoid the real work of purging. Knowing this, I commandeered one of the newly-empty storage tubs for “nostalgia”.  Anything I found that wanted to be lingered over went in the tub and I kept moving.

End of Day One
By late afternoon, we’d filled 19 trash bags with clothes to give away. (My original estimate for St. Vincent de Paul on the total number of bags for the entire project? 15.  I vastly underestimated.) At this point, I had to pick up the kids from school and find something for us to eat for dinner.  Our bedroom was significantly cleaner, but our nightstands still overflowed with books.  And nothing else in the house had been touched.

“So, tomorrow, we do books, right? That’s the next category to clear,” said John.  He was in a much better mood than I had anticipated. Something about Kondo’s attitude had helped him get over his reluctance to part with things that he wasn’t wearing.

“Books wasn’t really on my list,” I said, uneasily.  “We have a ton of books, but they all fit on the shelves. I feel like we could spend hours sifting our library and not get to the spaces that urgently need attention — like Henry’s room.  I want us to focus on finishing the second floor tomorrow and then we’ll have to do the whole first floor Friday. We are so behind.”

John was not convinced.  He argued that getting rid of books would free up space to put other things away.  We argued for several minutes, but I put my foot down.  This was MY big crazy project and I was in charge, not the mystical Japanese clutter guru. Tomorrow, we would finish John’s clothes and the entire second floor, method be damned.