KonMari’d a kid

We’ve been rolling through our house like an unstoppable KonMari machine, and the most recent victim beneficiary was Mik’s bedroom. He wouldn’t have called it fun to spend three hours with his parents determining which of his possessions spark joy (answer: basically like four of them), but I know he is glad not to be starting his high-school years with a bedroom full of stuffed animals and crayons and seventy-three different sizes of clothes.

(For the record, joy-sparking possessions include T-shirts related to athletic achievements, a Pinewood Derby car shaped like a rubber chicken, a Portal blanket, and every scrap of paper that has anything to do with Science Bowl. We left him a bit more than that, obviously, but it’s nice to know what the essentials are.)

An unfortunate side effect of cleaning Mik’s room is that he wanted to throw out a big box of old stories and drawings, and I didn’t want him to, so now there’s a bunch of kid memorabilia sitting in a pile in my once-clean office INTERRUPTING THE FLOW OF MY PEACE. (This is what you get for not doing things in the proper order—am I right, people who have read this book??)

I’m starting to think it really will be possible to finish the whole house within six months, which is awesome considering that the KonMari promise is that once you experience that single moment of whole-house tidiness nirvana, you will never have to do this again.