cleaning with konmari

If you think this post is about cleaning with seafood, you are mistaken (but probably not alone). I'd love to talk with you today about a task/chore that consumes a large chunk of our lives, and possibly offer some tips on how to streamline things. Have I piqued your interest? You're in for a real treat...hold on to our pants! Or don't. (You'll be able to laugh about that in about five minutes.)

My very first piece of advice would be this: get rid of your children. If left to myself, I could live happily in a (modern) shoebox with two outfits and a standard piece of Ikea furniture. (Though Greg will scoff at this I'm sure, as I just spent $198 at Amazon Prime.) However, if you, like me, absolutely can't do without your kids, there are some other options.

We all know what it is to clean. I'm mostly Dutch, and we Dutch grow up believing that cleanliness is next to godliness. Though the Dutch are kinda crazy, so take that with a slice of cheese. Or chocolate, or (blood) diamonds. So, I grew up in a clean home. Not plastic-on-the-davenport clean, but it was comfortably clean, and I would sometimes surprise my mom by taking the vacuum attachment and running it over the living room cream carpet to make it look like it had just been vacuumed. This may tell you to what extent I clean--I want things to look good, get rid of the majority of dirt, but not pick-up-the-couch kinda clean. I really didn't even believe people like that existed. So when I started cleaning houses in college, and one client asked that I move the furniture and vacuum underneath it once a month, I kinda shrugged that off, thinking it's just something we say, but don't do. (Like, "I'm going to wake up super early tomorrow to work out!") Well, my roommate Cheri went to this house one night, and they began to move the couch to make more room, only to reveal a trail of dust-bunnies, to which she quickly exclaimed, "Who cleans your house?!" Somehow I went on cleaning houses for the next 15 years, but I still never moved couches. In fact, last month I saw something black under our living room couch, only to find it was a bunny "pellet." And we haven't had a bunny for 6 months. But I'm only 3/4 Dutch.

I do the regular cleaning at our house, mostly because I'm faster and better. Well, Greg would actually be better, but it would take him a full week as opposed to my one hour. When he cleans he's very in-depth. He spent one hour cleaning our electric toothbrush holder, does the kitchen floor by hand (that's when Cheri walked in once, and started the Greg Schemper Fan Club --how does Cheri keep popping up in my stories?!) and, apparently, he wipes down the shower after every use. (I was starting to think we had a self-cleaning shower.) So, there are different levels of clean, and I like to believe that one is not better than the other. Unless you're getting paid, apparently. I should also mention that general picking-up goes along with this whole cleaning thing, and 3 out of the 4 of us are pretty good at that, but I'm sure this wasn't always the case. My mom used to say to me and my brother, "Do you think that a little elf comes in here at night to pick up after you?!" My mom is pretty short, so in the dark...I'm just sayin', it could have been confusing.

Ok, how are we doing? The next topic is organization! Organizing is my hobby, and I don't know why some of us enjoy it and others don't, but you can quite easily tell where people stand on the spectrum. For example, this is how I keep track of my papers for work:

And this is how Greg keeps track of his papers for work:

Do you see the difference? Granted, Greg has 572% more paperwork than I do, but I think you can see an underlying difference here in how we organize. Our personal email in-boxes? I have 2 messages (I do get mail, I just respond right away and delete), Greg has 4513 in one, 24,605 in the other. No joke. Anyways, if I get stressed out, overwhelmed, or just want to relax, I re-organize the kitchen, clean out the freezer, a drawer, or the girls' rooms (they keep me in business). But if organizing is only sorting and moving stuff around, then we end up just getting more stressed out! Which brings me to my third and final topic: minimalism.

That we are living in homes larger than ever and are filling up these homes, garages, and attics to the point of needing extra places to store our stuff is mind boggling. I can't get into the psychology of this right now, but it seems rather messed up to me! And I'm a psychology minor, so you can take my word for that. So then we see the small-house movement, which makes a family of three living in 350 square feet look great in the magazine pictures, but wait until Jr. there can no longer sleep in the closet and wants to play with Legos, then we'll talk. There has got to be something in-between. Enter Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. You can read more about her KonMari method here, but the gyst of her method is that by decluttering our homes, we can declutter our lives, our minds, and save time and money. She suggests the methods and specific order to doing this, and I got SO very excited when I read her book a couple of years ago. There are only two main faults I can find with her theory: No. 1, she has no children. Children are natural-born hoarders. Like they should have their own show, and God-forbid they ever have to part with anything, because that Kleenex they're saving from last month has some pretty strong sentimental value. And No. 2, only we can cleanse our own things. She suggests that we hold every item and ask whether it serves a purpose and "brings us joy," but turns out I'm not supposed to answer that question for other people's things (learned that the hard way, as most of Greg's things don't bring me joy). Along this same line is the theory of minimalism, which teaches that we find happiness not through things, but through life itself, so we have to decide what is necessary and what is not. A specific example of these two concepts would be capsule wardrobes where instead of buying, storing and maintaining a closet full of disposable clothes, why not invest in classic pieces and keep only what you love with some basic versitile pieces? Do you see where I'm going with this? Get rid of some of your stuff!

So, to re-cap, if we can (1) only keep things we use and love, (2) keep those things in some sort of order around the house, and (3) actually, physically, clean them once in a while, our lives will be easier! Well, until the kids come home from school anyways. And, today only, and because I like your face.... Just kidding, I'm not going to offer to clean your house, but I'll give free organizing consultations any day of the week! But not today, of course. There is some residual bunny poop under my couch I've got to take care of.