There’s a mess of books on getting rid of stuff

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This article was published 20/01/2018 (3194 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

January is the organization month. All around us, media, advertising, television home shows offer the potent possibility of a big reset button. By changing our closets, cupboards and shelves, the experts suggest, we can fundamentally transform our lives.

So, taking a hard look at my stacked storage room, I also decided to take a look at some of the most popular recent organizing books.

Remodelista: The Organized Home: This profusely illustrated 2017 book is from the people behind the Remodelista website. Specializing in ruthlessly curated lists of housewares, Remodelista favours extremely simple, slightly archaic and often unexpectedly expensive objects like horsehair brooms, hand-forged iron nails and waxed Irish linen twine. This “one perfect object” approach extends to the new book.

PROS: The exquisitely beautiful photographs.

CONS: The exquisitely beautiful photographs.

Call it the Martha Stewart paradox. The immaculate images in Remodelista: The Organized Home are so impossibly inspiring they actually sap my resolve. I will never measure up to these mirages of order and restraint and upscale plywood, so why even try?

It doesn’t help that many of Remodelista’s linen closets and bathroom shelves look more like minimalist art installations than the everyday interiors of middle-class North American homes.

My laundry room would probably look better if I decanted my detergent into a fusti, a stainless steel Italian olive oil container, as Remodelista suggests. But that will never happen.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class: Japanese organizing dominatrix Marie Kondo, who became a North American sensation in 2015, is so popular that her name has been turned into a verb. Decluttering buffs now talk about “totally ‘kondo-izing’” their stuff.

The Kondo method requires you to hold every object in your house in your hands and ask yourself whether it “sparks joy.” If not, then out it goes. Like many totalitarian doctrines, this scorched-earth approach to the whole-home clean-out is both seductive and scary.

PROS: It’s hard to resist the term “tidying up,” such a modest and old-fashioned notion.

And if you like folding, then Kondo is the woman for you. In Spark Joy, which includes detailed diagrams of origami-like complexity, she insists that almost anything, including dresses, can be folded into little fabric packets that look to be the size of bread rolls.

CONS: Kondo’s rather dry and strict little books suggest a life that is perfectly organized but not necessarily much fun. Kondo’s list of items that can be discarded immediately includes the slightly forlorn category, “Bedding for the Guest Who Never Comes.”

Kondo casts a suspicious eye on books, which could be a deal-breaker for some people. She considers books to be sneaky space-hogs that attempt to escape the cull by sitting quietly on their shelves. (“Although in plain sight, they remain unseen, like a praying mantis still in the grass, merging with its surroundings.”)

As well, does viewing objects as having inner lives, as Kondo advocates, make it easier to clean out your kids’ rooms? Or does it just suggest the super-sad ending of Toy Story 3?

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: A surprise bestseller by Margareta Magnusson, this charming, funny 2017 book was sparked by the author’s experience of cleaning out households after the deaths of elderly relatives.

This plainspoken and self-reliant Swede, who describes herself as “aged between eighty and one hundred,” advocates cleaning out your own home, rather than leaving the daunting task to your children.

PROS: Magnusson is warm but commonsensical, viewing her own odd accumulated objects (including a singing magnetic pig) as markers of a long and happy life, while acknowledging that her children might not feel the same way.

She is also bracingly direct. “Save your favorite dildo,” Magnusson counsels, “but throw away the other fifteen!”

CONS: If you are under 50, you probably won’t be keen on a method that uses death as a motivator for finally cleaning out your home office. But as with so many things related to mortality, death cleaning is really about life, about figuring out what really matters.

“You really can’t take everything with you,” Magnusson points out, “so maybe it is better to not to try to own it all.”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca