What is a tidying festival?
The principle difference between a standard organising session and KonMari, is that a tidying festival teaches more than just tidying.
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By going through the festival category by category and not room by room, you will create permanent change in your home that doesn’t cause a rebound. You should only need to complete the tidying festival once.
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A tidying festival is a longer term project and helps to address and change our life long relationship to objects helping us lead a simpler life. Below you will find the order of the categories and a brief explanation of what is involved.
We will start by gathering all of your clothes from across your home. This will include clothes in other rooms, the attic or the loft for instance.
We make a pile of these clothes. The pile will help you to:
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Recognise how much you actually have.
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Gives a reality check
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Motivates a change
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Acts as a reset button
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We will work through each item, choosing what you love first. I will ask you questions to help you navigate the joy check process.
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Once you have decided which clothes you want to keep, I will teach you how to fold and store your clothes to maximise the space you have.
Category 1 - Clothes
Category 2 - Books
This is quite a physical category as books can be heavy. As always, we start by making a pile of all the books in your house.
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​A common misconception is that the KonMari Method® suggests discarding all books, this is not true. If you are a book lover, why not make a bookshelf the star of your room?
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If you are horrified by the idea of discarding a particular book for instance, this reaction is a signal that the book sparks joy to you.
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Once all the books have been checked. I will then show you how to organise and store your books.
Category 3 - Papers
Marie says: "If your not on top of your game on papers, it means you have left something undone in your life that needs your attention"
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Most people keep way more papers than is necessary. The purpose of this category is to only keep what has a clear purpose.
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I will help to create a maintainable system for sorting papers so that you can keep on top of these moving forward.
Category 4 - Komono
Komono means everything that a person owns that does not fall into one of the other categories. In other words, anything that is not an item of clothing, a book, paper or a sentimental item.
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Komono is quite a huge category so we will break this down by category to avoid it being too overwhelming. We will start with the least difficult and end with the kitchen which can be the hardest to joy check.
Category 5 - Sentimental
We leave the hardest category until last. The main reason for this is that by the time you get to this category, you will have already mastered the skill of joy checking from all of the previous categories.
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Anything can be deemed as sentimental. It doesn't just have to be photographs and letters. For some people, certain books, a particular item of clothing for instance, all could be deemed sentimental.
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The key to storing sentimental items is to cherish and take care of them.