Whether you’ve resolved to organise and tidy up your home for 2019 or not, it’s always a good idea to begin the year on a clean slate. But if you don’t know where to begin cleaning in your home, why not turn to perhaps the planet’s biggest decluttering guru for help?
We’re talking about the Netflix sensation, Marie Kondo of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, of course.

If you’re not already familiar with Marie, she is a decluttering guru from Japan who has successfully helped many homeowners declutter their homes with her KonMari method. In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art Of Decluttering And Organizing, she is known for advocating decluttering by keeping only the things that “spark joy” in your life.
In Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, Marie visits a different home every episode to educate American homeowners and families on how to turn their homes around and keep their living spaces neat, tidy and free of clutter.
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Decluttering is an emotional and stressful process, and in this series, many of the homeowners undergo the pressure of cleaning up the home or discarding items they have held on to for years. Its inspiring and extremely satisfying, as you watch the transformation of a messy home become a clean and neat space, at the end of every episode.
Here are the top tips we picked up from the show:
Take out all your clothing from the wardrobe — don’t be daunted by the pile that it’ll create. Next, go through every piece of clothing and keep only the pieces that “spark joy” — the ones that bring you a warm and positive feeling.
Marie says, “your sensitivity to joy will be honed as you progress through the tidying process.” This may be a difficult task for individuals who are more sentimental and struggle with letting go of their possessions, but be objective and have the end in mind.
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Fold your clothes and have them stacked side by side. This way, it is easy to retrieve the pieces you want, without messing the rest of the clothing around.
Follow these steps:
- Create a rectangle in the middle
- Fold in half
- Fold into thirds
The final result you should be aiming for, is this small rectangle pictured above.
Marie made an interesting point about folding clothes (in the first episode) — “folding is not about making your clothes smaller, it is actually an important opportunity to talk to your clothes and thank them. By repeating this, you’ll learn to love folding.”
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There are many tools and cutleries to store in the kitchen, but how do you effectively organise them such that you can retrieve them easily whenever you need?
- Keep items together by size
- Utilise small boxes in the drawers to separate and store items
- Similar to organising clothings, create one big pile
- Hold each item one by one
- Only keep the ones that spark joy
- Most importantly, do not store them in trash bags; put them in clear containers. That way, it’ll be easier to see what’s inside, and retrieve what you need when the time comes.
If you encounter sentimental items while decluttering, Marie suggests addressing them last, as your sensitivity to joy becomes sufficiently heightened over the course of the tidying process.
Hopefully this inspires you to get right into the spring cleaning mood for the upcoming Chinese New Year too!
Watch the trailer for Tidying Up with Marie Kondo below:
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Photo: Screenshot from Netflix
Text: Domenica Tan, Home & Decor Singapore