Adulting: Tidying up with us (learn what really works for you… and what doesn’t)

Adulting

Today we are starting a new series about those topics that come up as you have more life responsibilities and how we deal with them. We have called it, with some playfulness (silliness?), adulting.

We are not trying to make a perfect guide of use, it will be a truthful approach on how we deal with finances, house tidying (today), friendships and many other subjects that I would like to approach in this blog year. I am always curious about how people deal with daily tasks to benefit from other people’s learnings. It’s precisely what it’s amazing about this new millennial world, where you can brave yourself to try anything new because there’s surely someone that has already tried it and has compiled a list of tips, whether it is to bake a cake or to hack your office thermostat (btw, they are freezing us!).

Let’s start the first chapter with a recurrent winter topic: tidying up! Our story starts 2 months before the Netflix show was released, keep reading!

The two masquerade prints are by the multi-talented Burntfeather, and I like to think that represent us two.

Our 2-bedroom apartment does not have a lot of storing space: we have two built-in wardrobes (one at each bedroom) for everything clothing/bedding/towels, so we are always trying to take advantage of every little free inch. We do have two big drawers under the bed (bedding), another two under the bathroom sink (towels), but the clothes are mainly hanging from the two wardrobes or stored in our (not that big) IKEA dresser.

During this last fall season I was fed up with our configuration, because for our temperatures it doesn’t have much sense to be changing the closet completely over seasons. Instead, it works better for me to have everything always stored in the same place. Hence, I needed to make enough space in my single dresser drawer to keep all my sweaters and t-shirts (long & short sleeve) together.

That’s when Marie Kondo came to my mind, I remembered that long ago I saw this viral video about a Japanese method to fold vertically that saved lots of space. I went to the good old Youtube to find her (a lovely cheerful gal!) and decided that it was better to start with Daniel’s t-shirts.

I folded all the t-shirts following strictly Marie’s recommendation and put all the t-shirts back at the drawer. Did we save space? yes!, but during the following week we realize it had two big drawbacks:

• Dani’s t-shirt are mainly one color with some sort of wording or drawing on front, but when folded vertically all of them were white, blue or black. It was impossible for him to know which one was each, which is a direct no for us.
• The second problem was that the t-shirts were too thin and when stored vertically they came up with more wrinkles than usual.

Therefore I decided to abort mission and fold everything as usual. However, on January I watched the first episode of (now yes) the Netflix series and, again, I went on a rush for making the best of our dresser space. I thought, ok, let me start with my top drawer where I store the lingerie, tights, belts, collars and headbands. The result: almost two months since I changed it and I am still in love. I think it’s important to mention that this is the actual look of my drawers any day, I haven’t tided for the pictures!

I guess the most important factor was using the typical IKEA drawer box with compartments (which I already owned) combined with folding vertically, which allows to see all the available socks and lingerie at one sight. Previously, I had to move all of them which resulted in a mess every time I wanted one from the bottom. The box of tights (the orange), is from my dorm years at the University (imagine!) and I totally think I could find a prettier box (love this one!), and maybe dividers for the headbands. But for now, I am super happy of how it all turned out! I tied the headbands circular to follow the same philosophy to be able to see them at once.

Watching how happy I was with the top drawer, I went for my own clothing drawer with the objective, as I have mentioned previously, of being able to store all my sweaters and t-shirts together (which wasn’t the case until then).

With Daniel’s t-shirt experience I decided that I would store t-shirts as always, but the sweaters were a perfect candidate for the vertical fold. I am able to perfectly discern between them, because they have a big color and texture difference. Also, being bigger packs, the sweaters don’t come wrinkled. So far, thumbs up too!

Folding method

My KonMari(-ish) folding method for sweaters it is very similar to what I used before and how I still fold my t-shirts. Just that instead of only folding once in the middle I do two folds.

If I can recall right, Marie Kondo proposes to make a smaller pack by folding all the way to almost the end and then fold again from the same side. However, I find it easier to just follow almost the same folding method I’ve always used because I’m much faster and works for all our clothes, both the vertically and horizontally folded.

This is another example on how it’s better to adjust the method to what would make you feel more comfortable, taking just what would improve your space & time.

Rainbow DVD shelves

A hot topic that has raised a lot of negativity towards Marie Kondo after the Netflix show is the famous 30 books “limit”. I think some of the comments are raised by taking the method too literally, not taking into account for instance the typical Japanese house sizes and that this isn’t black or white: it was created to help you feel better at home, not to go against your true self. The first thing that Marie always says is: does it spark joy? Well, my books and dvd collections spark me a lot of joy, so following her advice they are a keeper, right? What do you think about this? I have the feeling that there was a huge misinterpretation and unnecessary online hate.

Well, although our DVDs bring me a lot of joy, we were quite frankly a little bored on how they looked on our wood bookcase. Also, the color chaos was contributing to hide all those little knick-knacks that bring us memories from our travels. For a while, we were debating if the way to go was to put doors, but then, what would happen with the decorations? So, in the middle of my tidying up dash, I remembered how I’ve seen some cute rainbow shelves (with books) that would help us make amends with the dvd bookcase.

Veredict: it is a keeper! What do you think?

One of the positive things that has happened after this change is that we have re-discovered some forgotten titles from our collection. Can you peek some of your favorite movies in the former photos? Let us know in the comments, I’d love to know!