How to tidy your house, the 'life-changing' Marie Kondo way

It’s the little book with long legs.

Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” is as slim and trim as the lifestyle it promotes.

Pare back your home to the bare bones, keeping only what you absolutely need and embellish only with the things that bring you “joy.” Written by a 30-year-old Japanese organizer, “Tidying Up” hit America’s hoarding shores like a tsunami a little more than a year ago, stirring up a national debate about home organization.

Kondo’s way is really a way of life, a philosophy, where objects are anthropomorphic, deserving of more respect than to be crammed into a drawer or stuffed into a closet. She laments the balled-up socks that are “always in a state of tension.”

Clothes grouped with their own tribe - sweaters with sweaters, jackets all together - “can relax more freely when in the company of others of similar type,” she kindly asserts.

Most people raved. The book, published by Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, has been glued to the New York Times Self-Help Best-Seller List for 60 weeks with more than 2 million copies sold. Kondo has more than 14,000 followers on Twitter.

Her new follow-up book, “Spark Joy,” an in-depth, illustrated manual on how to declutter and organize specific items throughout the house, from kitchen and bathroom items to work-related papers and hobby collections, hits the market this week, joining a flood of other new organizational books for the new year.

Sure, a few non-believers harrumph that Kondo’s way is too extreme; a Wall Street Journal headline called the so-called KonMari Method a cult.

It’s spawned a raft of satire, cartoons and humorous riffs and rants. But her belief that fewer possessions make those you have more precious makes sense within an understanding of the Japanese reverence for certain objects and Kondo’s gentle humor.

In 2014, Americans spent $7.7 billion on products to help us organize our stuff and another $24 billion on storage. Kondo’s minimalist approach does away with the need for costly boxes, bins and storage units.

Does it work? For those who have read the book or are familiar with its precepts, has it managed to transform their lives?

“I absolutely agree with her around keeping the things you love and bring you joy,” said professional organizer Kari Wishingrad, owner of Organizing by Kari in Sonoma.

“I see that with so many of my clients. They’ll say, ‘Oh, my ex gave that to me.’ But they won’t get rid of it. I truly believe items hold energy and activate or reactivate certain feelings. If it’s not a positive or uplifting feeling, it’s time to let that go.”

But Wishingrad breaks from KonMari when it comes to one of her basic precepts - to purge all at once and not by rooms or closets or drawers, but by categories.

Kondo’s method calls for tackling clothing first, pulling every article from every part of the house, putting them all in a piles of shirts, pants, etc and holding each piece carefully and asking the question, “Does this spark joy?”

If you don’t love it, discard it. And once you’ve purged, you can’t go back. Any stray shirt found on the floor of a closet must go.

She finds that the KonMari extreme purge is “too overwhelming” for most people. Purging by category can take awhile before any progress can be seen, she said, leading to discouragement. Doing it by room or by closet or drawer gives clients a sense of the possibilities, of what the rest of their house can look like.

Maybe it’s the difference between Japanese culture and American. We expect fast results and can become discouraged quickly.

Wishingrad said for many of her clients, purging is like peeling an onion.

“They’ll bring me in and we’ll do a sweep of the house and the next time it goes deeper,” she said.

“And each time they’re ready to get rid of more and more things. I don’t think it all happens in one fell swoop. It’s a process. If they’re not ready to let go, I’m not going to make them.”

A lot of people seem to adopt only bits and pieces of the KonMari approach. A lot of people are high on her ingenious ways of folding clothes and standing them upright rather than stacked, not only permitting many more items to fit into the same amount of space, but making it easier to see what you have.

“I liked rolling my shirts and clothes up. It really did condense my space down,” said Lakin Khan, who tried out the KonMari method a year ago and came away appreciating some of her basic precepts without embracing the whole extreme program.

She was able to eliminate one whole dresser of clothes through efficient and vertical folding. And while she didn’t purge through every category of items in her house, she did manage to see the duplication, like that she had too many dumpy chairs crowding her 1,000-square-foot cottage.

The Petaluma writer, who teaches at Napa College, tried organizing by colors and type of fabric, but abandoned the project.

“I thought about putting everything in my closet so they slope to one side but I decided just having my pants on one side of the closet is enough. There are good nuggets in there. The idea of only having the things you actually care about and actually want to wear is really valuable,” she said.

Kay Schweitzer listened to “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” as an audio book, but that was after she had gone through a radical downsizing when she moved from Michigan into a townhouse in Windsor.

The 71-year-old retiree wound up selling a lot on eBay, including all her professional work clothes and her grown children’s toys. A “Dark Tower” game from the early 1980s fetched $240.

She suspects the KonMari approach might be more realistic in Japan, with its minimalistic aesthetic and where houses are so small.

“I think she would walk in my house and throw up her hands,” she said.

“I don’t consider my home messy. It’s not very cluttered, but I do like having my spinning wheel out and I like looking at it. Looking at my fiber make me happy.

“I can see stuff creeping back into my life. But if nothing else, the book was a prod for me to repeat the process and keep going through things.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.