Energizing Your Closet

When rushing to clean up my room, I know the first thing I try to do is throw everything into my closet. This leads to a growing mess and a difficulty in finding anything. Even when my closet is at its neatest, it is still a jumbled mess. Facing this struggle on a daily basis has gotten frustrating overtime. Reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, has improved my closet tremendously.

For as long as I can remember, I just stuffed clothes in wherever they would fit. This, according to Kondo, is my first problem. She explains that the most basic part of having an organized closet is to sort your clothes by category: jackets, dresses, coats, and so on (Kondo 78). This makes perfect sense. It makes things much easier to locate and groups like items for ease in choosing what to wear. But this alone wouldn't solve my problem since I had tried this before unsuccessfully. Soon after organizing my closet, it gets messy again due to my laziness. It feels like an endless cycle of cleaning and sorting.

Kondo offers a solution to this problem. She instructs, “Arrange your clothes so that they rise to the right” (Kondo 79). At first, I was skeptical of this strategy. It sounded useless and I doubted its effectiveness. How could this make any difference at all? Despite my uncertainties, I went along with it. To get an idea of what the closet will look like when down, Kondo includes that, “As you move toward the right side of the closet, the length of the clothing grows shorter, the material thinner, and the color lighter” (Kondo 79). This basically makes your warm-weather located on the right side of your closet, while your thick coats are on the left. While doing this, you must also continue sorting by category, which is trickier than it sounds.

Now I’ve got to admit, it didn’t feel quite what like Kondo describes. She says organizing your closet this way will transmit energy to your clothes and body, and will also freshen your room. This causes you to never go back to a disorganized closet (Kondo 80). My first impression was not a re-energizing feeling, but her method has so far proved surprisingly effective for the week or two since tidying it. I’m not sure how long it will last but it has been enjoyable having an orderly closet for once.

Here is some before and after shots of my closet.

Before

After

Do you think that this strategy would be effective for you? Or is there any modifications that you think would make this more successful? Also, if you try it, let me know how it works for you!

Kondo, Marie. The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Trans. Cathy Hirano. Berkeley: Ten Speed, 2014. Print.