If you read my latest blog post Journey to Tiny House Living, you may recall me mention our family’s plan to tidy up our tiny NYC apartment. Although our home is typically quite neat and organized, the truth is we have acquired way too much stuff again. Stuff that would never neatly fit into a tiny home. In addition, things have been quite chaotic for us the past few months. And chaos and clutter don’t mix. So, we have been planning to make some changes for some time now. We were inspired to start sorting through all of our belongings and purging after watching the Netflix docu-series “Tidying Up” with Marie Kondo. The series helped us realize that a thorough household cleaning and organization task would A: better prepare us to soon live in a tiny house and B: bring back the sense of calm/structure in our lives which kind of escaped us since our relapse to excessive buying, spending, and collecting. I’ve always found cleaning to be very therapeutic however, this challenge proved to be that and more on a much higher level. So detailed herein is the process of how we tidied up our nest… purged, organized, and deep cleaned to be exact; some of our thoughts and feelings during the challenge; and many pictures to show before the purge and after. (Link to our YouTube video at the conclusion).
On Wednesday 2/13/19, “mini me” and I began day one of our seven day “Tidying Up” challenge at home. I planned for no work or clients for the week, and scheduled nothing else for us to do. Hubby’s work schedule would not allow him to really be a part of the fun so we left his closet for him to complete on his own this weekend. We started tidying our “loving room” first as it is the place where we spend the most time. Out of all the rooms in our home, it is the neatest with most of the clutter nestled away in our tv stand. For this challenge, we pulled all things (which included papers, pictures, old electronics, craft supplies, and more) out from their hiding places. We got huge trash bags and Banker’s Boxes and got to work. We spent at least four hours sorting between things to be trashed, things to be stored, and things to be neatly tucked away. Bree had a blast shredding papers, taking pictures and videos, and singing along to our cleaning playlist. At the end of it all, our living room was decluttered and smelling fresh. We lit some candles, turned on our essential oil defuser, and soaked in the new energy in the room. Our “loving room” has become even more of a place where we want to spend our time. Following day one of the cleanse, we rested.
Each day I targeted one room or closet. I was so into making everything as perfect as possible that I couldn’t do multiple spaces per day without tiring myself out. Following the living room, I hit the dining room and our coat closet on day two. This portion of the challenge mainly consisted of shredding more papers and mail, reorganizing the way in which things were stored in our hallway closet, and packing up the things that we occasionally use to be sent to our storage unit. Before I considered the project in our dinning complete, I vacuumed and mopped the floors, scrubbed the walls, and cleaned the baseboards. The finished product is seen in the picture below. The catastrophe that our dining room was prior to working on it, is captured in our YouTube video.
After the organization that we did on the second day of our challenge, I felt so happy, refreshed, and empowered from simply cleaning as corny as that sounds. But it was my effort at tidying that was creating a new energy in the rooms of our home for us all to enjoy. And as I saw progress I felt motivated to keep going. I moved on from tackling our coat closet on day two to getting busy in our linen closet on day three.
I’m embarrassed to say that this was once the condition of my linen closet, which is actually home to a lot more things than just linens. Our linen closet houses towels, sheets, hair and beauty supplies, cleaning products, and dirty laundry. Out of all the places in my home, I believe it should be one of the neatest as everything in it is related to cleanliness, upkeep, and appearance. It was much more neatly kept once upon a time but things changed as more and more items needed a home there. As the third place that I tidied in this challenge, it was my favorite to organize. I was able to make a new space that allowed me to access ALL of my makeup, folded my sheets and towels so pretty that they were nice to look at, and organized everything without one thing being out of place. It was a quick task and transition in comparison to the other two spaces that I started with, and allowed me to move on to my kitchen in the same day.
My kitchen is typically spic and span. I spend a lot of time there preparing meals for my family (my absolute favorite thing to do). I find it hard to function in there and successfully prepare a meal if anything is out of place. So I make it a priority to keep things neat and organized in the kitchen. However, like all of the other rooms in our home, the accumulated items have made it difficult to keep tidy and hard for me to live according to the rule that I constantly feed to “mini me”… “everything has a home”. So the purging part of this challenge was much needed in the organization of our kitchen. As I tossed mismatched Tupperware and spaced and stacked my spices, I began to love my kitchen even more. After I found new homes above our cabinets for less frequently used items, the space became so much more open. The lemon scent was amazing and so was the smell of dinner in the Crockpot!
On Day four of this challenge, I targeted our bathroom which is probably the size of three chartered bus bathrooms. There was very little to organize and you’ll see the before and after in our YouTube video. It was super easy and allowed me to move on to the next jobs quickly. The last two rooms and challenge days six and seven nearly took us out. We saved the worst for last… our bedrooms! After being away from home for over three weeks, we returned and dropped our bags on the floors in our rooms knowing that we would soon be tidying up. We let days pass and felt little need to put things away where they belonged. So we started tidying these spaces with a larger mess than we typically have. My anxiety tank was full and I felt very overwhelmed getting started. My patience was running thin and I’m sure “mini me” despised me those two days. However, the feeling I felt made it much easier for me to toss all the things that didn’t “spark joy” and needed to go, rather than come up with an excuse to keep them. I started to feel greedy and ungrateful when looking at the piles of things I had and never wore. I was a little disappointed that I went through this process three years ago but was back in the same place.
But……. things happen and you can’t cry over spilt milk; or in my case money spent that I’ll never get back. So I righted my wrong by decluttering and cleaning like I never did before. I insisted that Bree watch and help me in my bedroom to prepare her for the task at hand in her room. I completed my room after over eight hours. My back ached and my mood was off but I realized how much I cherished everything that remained in my room. And the hard work of this challenge will be the reason I think wisely before resorting to impulsive shopping again. I ultimately ended day six with three trash bags ready for donation and 15 new pairs of shoes (either never worn or worn once) ready to be sold online. The sentimental part of this task came as I gifted some of my small expensive pieces to my baby girl. When she tried them on and they fit her perfectly, it was eye opening that my “mini me” isn’t so mini anymore. With this realization, my room was complete. I rested and geared up for day seven in “mini me” ‘s room as that space is always hell to clean (sorry Bree).
On the final day of our “Tidy Up” challenge we finished how we started… together, singing along to a playlist, and reminiscing as we looked back at things that got lost amongst the clutter. In “mini me” ‘s room we recovered money from the places we’ve been (blog series coming soon), homeschooling projects that reminded us of what a bomb job we are doing, and books that we forgot we had. We retired with not one corner left unswept or unexamined. There is now so much less to fuss with and a room that baby girl says she’s proud of.
“Mini me” says:
“The Tidying Up challenge was very helpful for me because after seeing all the clothes that I had to give away, I felt so relieved. It made me feel better knowing that if my mom were to check my room, there would not be tons of things keeping me up until 1:00am cleaning my room lol. I feel so much better. I hope that other people get a chance to try it!
Altogether, it felt great dedicating seven full days of our time to transforming the spaces in our home. We have a new appreciation for the things that we have and are reminded that we are happier with less. As always, I documented this journey to inspire. As Americans, we are very privileged and this can sometimes cloud our mind to the idea of minimalistic living. So I encourage someone to take on the challenge of “tidying up”. Not because of the Netflix series or because it seems to be the thing to do right now; but because it is our memories rather than materials that give life the most meaning. At the end of this Millennial Mom “Tidying Up” Challenge, the memory of sharing this experience with my daughter and learning a few important life lessons is what I’ll take away. I dare you to try it!
Check out how we completed this challenge from beginning to end in our first Millennial Mom related YouTube video 👇🏾:
Millennial Mom “Tidying Up” Challenge
More to come from Millennial Mom in the days ahead and it’s looking like a series reminiscing on the places we’ve traveled to, is up next so stayed tuned. Until next time…
Xoxo,
Millennial Mom
Did you enjoy this post? Have some questions? Want to join the challenge? Drop a comment and feel free to hash tag #MMtidyupchallenge if you go for it.
Millennial Mom 