KonMari 2016 - The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Libellula84

I have been very productive and got rid of a load of still decent bras to charity, and in an entirely unrelated incident some bags of sand that have been staring at me since we moved in 4 years ago. The plastic had perished so I had to decant it into separate bags which was a major faff. Lesson learned.


Justin is bothering me!! My iron was terrible for marking clothes (not that I use it, my technique is to deliberately put on something that badly needs ironed and wait for the OH to sigh and iron it for me!)
We now have new bargain iron that sparks joy, but do I keep the old one in the event that this one suddenly meets a catastrophic end and I can't go out in public!!!!!????

Floss

No, because it marked clothes, which does not spark joy.

Also irons can be bought in any 24 hour supermarket, at not a great deal of money.

mrs-moneypenny

Back from work, did some filing and putting way of art works afterwards as they were annoying me on the side.

Dealt with a couple of phone calls and relevant paperwork so that can be posts off in the morning.
Going to kondo a cuppa, then sort out what food needs prepping for tonight. I may even tackle the ironing pile.

Hope all are well and had a good day.

Slinky

Please stop talking about ironing. Got a huge pile to do that didn't get done last weekend because of visitors. I'm on my physically demanding work week so really can't be arrised to iron, but it'll have to be done at some point as it's OH's work shirts.

Not much Kondoing going on here, but am aiming to keep the house tidy following the tidy up for visitors last weekend.

GreyQueen

:huh: Ironing...... I think I've heard of this before.

It's when three-dimensional warm and clammy beings fashion exterior casings for themselves from rectangles of cloth sewn from other rectangles of cloth, which then don't want to lie completely flat, because we made them like that.

And then we create electicity and send it into bits of shaped metal so we can squash the wrinkles out of our cloth casing rectangles before we put them on so they will be smooth for the 5-10 minutes before our warm and clammy selves make those wrinkles fall out and completely new wrinkles develop.

Because if you don't de-wrinkle the original wrinkles, you will be seen as Slovenly, Unprofessional and, quite possibly, a Bad Wife and Mother.

For some reason, I can see an ironing version of the Smash mashed potato advert from the 1970s when I write this......... :rotfl:

I studiously avoid ironing whenever possible and find it a restful approach to life. I have even managed to corrupt my ever-dutiful mother, who received her domestic programming back in the 1950s, and she is letting much less ironing happen at her house. The world still turns and no one over there has died of creasiness or social shame thus far.

The cats are simply disgusted, tho, and are threatening to leave home.

Floss

GQ, if you threaten to iron the cats they will soon come into line

GreyQueen

Floss wrote: »

GQ, if you threaten to iron the cats they will soon come into line

The cats are particularly partial to snoozing on top of a pile of freshly-ironed clothes in a linen basket but have seldom been rash enough to risk stretching out on the actual ironing board itself.

I was meditating on ironing (a diabolical fib, I was eating my supper and pondering idly) and I reckon it's all about social status.

Once upon a time, the world was separated into the Starched and The Great Unironed. Starchy people originally were able to be so because they could afford to pay other people two breadcrusts and a cup of peas for a day's hard graft inc dashing away with the smoothing iron.

Smoothed clothes were a subtle way of saying to the world Yah boo sucks, I'm soooo rich I can make other people do utterly pointless things for hours to make me look ever-so-slightly better than ye-ow.

As is always the way, social pretensions have a habit of sliding down the social classes. So people who couldn't afford servants got their own smoothing irons and got those people within the household whose time was regarded as Less Important to do ironing.

These people were called Wives and Daughters in most cases. Therefore the menfolk could go out into the world of commerce looking all starchy and almost as important as much richer men who could afford servants. This made some of them happy, many of them didn't really give a monkey's either way, and many people with two X chromosomes got really really tee'd off that they spent irreplacable parts of their lifetime making things really flat.

At this point, textile technology advanced so that something called cotton jersey was available and shrewd women quickly bought as much of it as they could get their hands on, and hung it on coat-hangers as soon as they got it out of the washer, and vowed never to iron again.

mrs-moneypenny

Lol GQ your description of ironing sounds about right, I do find it rather therapeutic especially Tshirts even more so now I get to fold them afterwards. Which is rather a contradiction in terms, to iron out the creases then fold them neatly into little bundles of creased folds.

GreyQueen

I've found that lowering my standards of how cute my kondo-folded clothes should look in my drawers enables me to fold straight from the clothes airer without the intervening ironing stage.

Heck, wherever possible, I aim to dress straight from the clothes airer, to avoid any unnecessary clothes-shuffling.

As you may have gathered, I escaped from the woman-factory with some severely-defective programming. I could have ironed last night if I'd wanted to but I thought it was funnier to go to my archery class and practise shooting a longbow.

Mind you, I'd rather do almost anythng but iron and can usually be found lying on the sofa reading thrillers and drinking tea in my leisure time.

silvasava

Well I've just read about 10 days worth of posts and I've chuckled, applauded, sympathised, laughed and been thoroughly impressed with the Kondoing going on. You lot are all absolutely brilliant. :T
Nearly finished the washing and it started hailing ( the weather not the washing!) As I unpacked and was putting stuff away I had a LBM - why do I put holiday items ( magnifying ng mirror, travel alarm, plug adaptors etc) in the top wardrobe cupboard when they could be stored in the small carry-on case. Accessible but all together - Doh!
Thank you to whoever posted about the folding boxes for laundry - I have two baskets that do not spark Joy and an 8inch gap at the side of the machine where I could store folding ones more easily and tidily.
We've just been to our caravan to clear it before it's sold. I de cided to leave the crockery, cutlery and saucepans for the new owners if they want them as I have plenty here and don't need any Justin's.
Unfortunately I now have all the other contents to find homes for - not necessarily in mine!
Some of you were talking about steam cleaners. I bought a large S cleaner some years ago but was not impressed but TBH I don't think I'm using it properly. Must have another go and try it on my tiles - be glad of any tips on how best to use it.
Off to try and sort another bag of caravan stuff and where I'm going to store the Halogen oven - think I have a home for it as I've kondoed kitchen cupboards but may decide to use it instead of my oven for some things - we shall see.