Marie Kondo and my Bedroom Project

Let me say right off the bat that I’m about to trash Marie Kondo’s methods of “tidying up.’ If you don’t know who she is, she’s got a new TV show on Netflix that is based on her run-away best-selling books and just about every talk show has either been talking about or interviewing her. As a blogger friend said, “You either love her or hate her.” For me, ‘hate’ is a strong word that I reserve for presidents who commit High Crimes and Misdemeanors but a guest on The View was quick to label Marie “his mortal enemy.” If you’re one of her fans stop reading if you can’t be open-minded about my reasons for not buying into her philosophy starting right out with her calling what she does “tidying up.” In one of her videos she said she’s had clients who filled up over a 100 trash bags. That’s not “tidying up” that’s deep cleaning or decluttering. Tidying up is putting the potholders in the drawer and making your bed because company is coming. Language matters. You wouldn’t call a leg amputation a pedicure and you’re not “tidying up” when you can put a 100 trash bags out to the curb on trash pickup day. Also, Marie never addresses the psychological reasons why possessions are security to people who ‘hoard’ to that extent.

To be fair to the girl, I decided to do some research to figure out why she evokes such a negative reaction in me. In addition to watching some of her YouTube videos I bought the Summary: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. It’s a 75 pages, $3.99 Kindle download and I read every page but it didn’t change my attitude nor make me want to click to buy the full book. I do like her method of folding socks and I’m am now using the official KonMari method of doing that task. I own a lot of socks. I have knee highs and no-show socks and everything in between---all black or gray. I even have old socks in my cleaning closet that are used to clean up dog vomit, after which I finally throw them out. I’ve tried to research how many socks are too many according to the Tidy Up Girl but I couldn’t find a number. She a minimalism so I’m guessing two pair in each style. I visualize her doing laundry nightly like someone living out of a suitcase.

One of the things that I bad-mouth about the KonMari method is Marie’s attitude towards books. She believes you should throw out books you haven’t read and books you’ve already read. Yup, if you’re reading a book that’s the only one in the house that’s safe from being labeled, “garbage” which is her favorite word to use for our stuff. She also says if you have a book you just can’t part with, tear out the pages you like and throw out the rest of the book. And if you can’t do the tear-out thing then, she says, put the books in a box and store them in your closet. Thirty should be enough to keep. I have an entire library room in the house with twenty-feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books. I value books. I wouldn’t destroy a book but I might start calling my library a book closet. All I’d have to do is cover the glass-paneled door over so you can’t see into the room from the living room. I do plan to purge and donate enough books so I can move six running feet of books from my bedroom to my new ‘book closet.’

Which brings me to another, exciting project. It started with an exhaust pipe in the roof that was leaking and caused a stain on the master bath ceiling. I had the pipe cap replaced, then I marked the edges of the stain so I could be sure it didn’t grow. Enough time has passed that I decided I could repaint the ceiling but guess what. A few years ago when I thought I was going to buy a condo I threw out the paint I’d saved for touch ups. Now I have to paint the whole bathroom so I’m taking the opportunity to change color schemes in the master bath and connecting bedroom and to get a smaller bed. So off I went to shop quilts as my color palette starting point. Hours and hours of online shopping later I bought a quilt and shower curtain. I’m going from a grey, black and red palette to a girlie beachy/cottage theme.

My closet purging project, by the way, got done. Like Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way’ in five sessions---not the KonMari one giant session way. Her method of piling all the clothing from all over the house into the center of a room, then picking up each piece and asking yourself it if sparks joy might work for some people but if I did that I’d end up with three things to hang back up: two iconic outfits from the ‘70s and a 1950s Scandinavian sweater that my mom made that earned me a quarter page photo in the newspaper with the headline: Baby, It's Cold Outside! I get joy from many things, but clothing is not in the mix. I get joy from my metal Cracker Jack toys, from my handmade scenic and portrait buttons from the 1800s, from books, stones and seashells. I get joy from my whale oil lamps, woman's suffrage postcards and art prints. The list goes on and much of it serves no useful purpose in this century. 

I do respect the idea of creating a smaller footprint---the minimalist mindset. I’ve read a lot about other minimalists in recent years because they do fascinate me but none of them make me feel like a lion who'd like to stalk them for dinner like Ms Kondo does and I figured out why. By her soft-spoken, simplistic labeling of everything that you don’t use daily or doesn’t spark joy as “garbage that you can get rid of” she’s insulting my entire, life-long collector’s life style. Other minimalists use words like ‘recycle’ and ‘donate’ for things you may have tired of owning which I don’t believe appeared even once in Marie's summary book while the word ‘garbage’ appeared so often that I wanted to bounce my Kindle up against the wall. ©

Photos: My new quilt at the top and this is my new shower curtain.

Redecorating Guy-Style

Sunday I was asked to go to my widowed brother’s house out in the boondocks to give some feedback and suggestions on a redecorating project he’s planning for his living room, dining area and kitchen. That sounds straight forward enough, doesn’t it, but I wasn’t sure how much arm twisting his lady friend did to get him to agree to bring me deeper into the mix than I already was. I was worried about tip-toeing around some conflicting ideas I knew they had. But I’m nothing if not my dad’s daughter, so I put on my diplomat’s hat and went out fully intent on finding out what look he’s going for and to do my best to get him where he wants to go without having a shootout at the O.K. Corral. I have an art degree. I know color and balance. I love them both so what could go wrong with a plan like that?

My brother’s first purchase for his new project was a huge, red chair. Okay. Granted most women would not start there, but he did and a good sister works with that without asking, “What were you thinking?” Besides, I knew he’d already gotten that question from his friend. The chair did give me an idea for a signed and numbered print that belonged to my husband. It has touches of red in it and I knew the other colors would look great with his brick fireplace. The print also has major guy appeal because it depicts an old general store with gas pumps out front. My brother loved it. Great! Prints are always a good place to start for color-scheme challenged people. Did I mention he also has a large, white leather couch to figure into the equation? A few weeks ago, when I heard about the red chair and the fact that he wanted an area rug to lighten up his dark wood flooring, I sent him a link to a rug online and he ordered a sample and it was there on Sunday, too. It worked perfect to pull all the fixed elements in his living room together and more importantly, my brother likes it. We kicked around a lot of ideas and we settled on paint colors and other small-but-important tweaks. I was happy. He was happy and his lady friend was happy. No one took a bullet or got their feelings or pride hurt. 

I volunteered to go back out after the painting is done to revamp the stuff on my brother’s wall of built-in shelves---it's all out of scale now---and to redo a collage of photos he keeps behind a large V-shaped window that had been salvaged out of our family cottage and was turned into a shadow box. His lady friend had lobbying to get rid of it (and the shelves) but I knew she’d have more luck finding an albino elephant to serve us afternoon tea. Instead, I suggested color changes that will de-emphasize the window's presence. Displaying and arranging photos and shelf decor is where I shine and my brother seemed pleased that I offered to tackle those jobs. We walked around his house, basement and poll building searching for treasures to put on the shelves and we settled on a few toys from his youth plus an edited version of the framed photographs he’s got scattered all over the place. I’ve never seen so many family photographs and snapshots in one house! They’re EVERYWHERE! And now that he has five great-grand babies all under two, his snapshots are spawning like white caps and brown gills at a mushroom farm. Thankfully, my brother is open to me helping him make some sense out of them. Maybe even relieved. He says people keep giving him pictures and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings so he puts them where they can be seen. He’s my dad’s child, too.

I gave my brother a mission---should he choose to accept it---to find some thing large, rectangle, metal and old to up-cycle into a photo collection display point for a wall in his dining area. My tame-the-photos plan is to put vintage photos in the shadow box, his kids' formal and family portraits on the shelves with the antique toys, and the great-grand-babies' and other in-flowing snapshots on the new photo display board. What he needs the most, though, to contain the photo clutter is permission to rotate pictures to photo albums or boxes when his photo display point gets too full. The key to keeping any collection from turning into a hoard is to designate a certain amount of "artful" space to it and when the space is full you either stop collecting or you upgrade what you’ve got by using the take-one-out-before-putting-one-in rule.

My brother’s lady friend lives closer to me than to my brother so we rode back and forth to his house together. On the way home I remarked that it had gone a lot easier than I thought it would and she said she couldn’t believe how agreeable he was to everything I suggested. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he was just feeling out-numbered and was doing the “Yes, Dear Dance” and when he comes back from the paint store he’ll have a can of purple instead of Alpaca Blanket and Weathered White. Stay tuned for part two of Redecorating Guy-Style. I’m sure there’ll be one. ©

Touring Hearts, Homes and Dark Memories

When I was young I was a fast worker. Now that I’m a septuagenarian I clean at a turtle’s pace. Finally, my bedroom has been deep cleaned but it took me five days. I used a mop to wash the walls so I didn’t have to get on a ladder and for the first time in my life I skipped doing the ceiling. But the blinds and windows are clean, the mattresses were flipped, the bed skirts have been washed and ironed, the furniture was polished and all the wall hangings are sparkling clean. The carpeting will wait until spring when I hire a professional to do the whole house. I changed my bedroom color scheme along with the deep cleaning project. The red sheets are gone and the red fabric that was framed to form a sort of headboard was swapped out to what you see in the photo above and I have enough fabric left over to make a decorative throw pillow. For under fifty bucks the room has a whole different energy. This is the room’s third reincarnation using framed fabric and new bedding which is one of the reasons why I love having neutral colored carpeting and walls.

After I got a haircut Monday I went to the Guy Land Cafeteria, one of my favorite people watching places. But the most interesting thing that happened was two black guys came in and not for the first time I wondered what it feels like to be black in a sea of white people. I’ve been going to this place for years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen a black person there, which tells you a lot about my white-bread neighborhood. They were wearing sweatshirts with ‘UChicago Tech’ written on the fronts which reminded me of a bus trip I took to The Windy City. It was in the spring of 1963 and we were a bunch of college students on our way to the museums. 

There was a detour in the city that took our bus through a ghetto complete with the driver’s mocking voice coming over the intercom describing what we were seeing, a dilapidated area with black people sitting on porches and kids looking with interest at our shiny motor coach bus with its tinted windows---at least I hope they were tinted back then. I'd hate to think those people outside the bus  saw us all staring at them. It was the first time I’d seen severe poverty up close. A few days after we got back home images of the police in Birmingham, Alabama using high-powered fire hoses and police dogs on black students, who had gathered to do a peaceful walk, dominated the nightly news. "They Fight a Fire That Won't Go Out" was the caption used on a photograph that appeared in Life Magazine of what happened that day---a day the world, including mine, woke up and started paying attention to the Civil Rights Movement. Over the years when I remember that bus trip I'm still stuck by how dehumanizing it was for the bus driver to treat that ghetto the way he did, like it was just another “tourist sight” along the way.

I thought about that tour recently when it was time to decide if I wanted to sign up for a senior hall tour, or not, of the oldest black church in town followed by a tour of a Buddhist Temple. I’ve wanted to go to the Buddhist Temple since I first learned about it ten years ago, so I put in my reservation although I’m slightly concerned that I’ll feel like we’re a bunch of white tourists when we visit the black church---like it’s an upgraded version of that trip in the ‘60s. This church tour is part of a monthly series billed as “How We Worship” and they include a talk by the church leaders so I’m sure my apprehension is for nothing. It’s not like they don’t know we’re coming or have no control over our visit. 

Race is such a hot button topic in recent years…well for some people. Maybe my naivety or flaming liberal nature will show up here when I say this but I don’t get how some whites can feel that being born white makes them better. It’s a crap shoot being born white or black. It’s a crap shoot being born into poverty or plenty. It’s a crap shoot if we get supportive, loving parents or those who aren’t. How can a person feel superior about something they had no control over and didn’t work to achieve? Opportunities matter and without a doubt just being born white before the Civil Rights Movement gave us more opportunities. Those opportunities compared to starting a 26 mile marathon at the 13 mile marker and wondering why the black kids, who started at the first mile marker, didn’t finish in the same time frame. 

Two black guys walked into a cafeteria on Monday and they ordered their food to go. Maybe they were traveling and didn’t have the time to sit down and eat, or maybe they wanted to talk shop while eating in private. I hope one of these two things is true because I’d be sad if they didn’t feel comfortable enough to eat their lunch inside. I looked around at my fellow diners and I didn’t feel an undercurrent going on. I listened to the cashier interact with the guys and noted no changes in her tone or demeanor. Still, the fact that their presence in my white-bread neighborhood was so unusual could be used as an example of how far true equality still has to go. ©

Levi on his side of the bed. He thinks it's cool he matches the decor`.