The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (15 page)

If you have already been selecting what to keep on the basis of what speaks to your heart, then you will
understand what I mean because you have already collected items by category, spread them out in one spot, and held them in your hand to make your decision. The work you have been doing has actually honed your ability to sense what belongs together and to choose appropriate places for storing them.

If you live with your family, first clearly define separate storage spaces for each family member
. This is essential. For example, you can designate separate closets for you, your husband, and your children, and store whatever belongs to each person in his or her respective closet. That’s all you need to do. The important point here is to designate only one place per person if at all possible. In other words, storage should be focused in one spot. If storage places are spread around, the entire house will become cluttered in no time. To concentrate the belongings of each person in one spot is the most effective way for keeping storage tidy.

I once had a client who asked me to help her child be tidy. Her daughter was three years old. When I visited her house, I found that her daughter’s things were stored in three different places: clothes in the bedroom, toys in the living room, and books in the Japanese tatami room. Following the basic principles of sorting and storing, we gathered everything in the tatami room. From that time on, her daughter began to choose her own clothes to wear and put away her things where they belonged. Although I
was the one who had given the instructions, I was surprised. Even a three-year-old can tidy!

Having your own space makes you happy. Once you feel that it belongs to you personally, you want to keep it tidy. If it is hard to give everyone his or her own room, you can still give each person his or her own storage space. Of the many people I’ve met who are not good at tidying, most had parents who cleaned their rooms for them or they never had a space that they felt was their very own. These people often store their clothes in their children’s dresser and their books in their partner’s bookcase. But not having a space you can call your own is dangerous.
Everyone needs a sanctuary
.

I realize that when you begin tidying, there is a real temptation to start with spaces or things that belong to the entire household, such as the living room, soaps and medicines, or various appliances and household supplies. But please leave those for later. First, start by sorting only your own things. Choose what you want to keep and store it in your very own space. By doing so, you will learn the basics of how to put your house in order. Just as with choosing which belongings to keep, following the right order is crucial.

Serious books on tidying commonly advise their readers to consider the flow plan when designing storage. I am not saying this advice is erroneous. There are many people who advocate practical storage methods based on careful consideration of the line of traffic in the house, so what I am saying here is intended to apply only to my own storage method. And I say, forget about flow planning.

When one of my clients, a woman in her fifties, had finished sorting and storing her own things, we tackled her husband’s belongings. She told me that her husband had to have everything right at hand, whether it was the remote control or a book. When I examined their living space, I found that, indeed, her husband’s things were stored all over the house. There was a small bookshelf for his books beside the toilet, a place for his bags in the entrance hall, and drawers for his socks and underwear near the bath. But that did not affect my policy. I always insist that storage be focused in a single place and therefore I told my client to move her husband’s underwear, socks, and bags into the closet where his suits were hanging. She looked a bit anxious. “But he likes to keep things where he uses them,” she said. “What if he’s upset.…”

A common mistake many people make is to decide where to store things on the basis of where it’s easiest to
take them out. This approach is a fatal trap.
Clutter is caused by a failure to return things to where they belong. Therefore, storage should reduce the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to get them out
. When we use something, we have a clear purpose for getting it out. Unless for some reason it is incredibly hard work, we usually don’t mind the effort involved. Clutter has only two possible causes: too much effort is required to put things away or it is unclear where things belong. If we overlook this vital point, we are likely to create a system that results in clutter. For people like me who are naturally lazy, I strongly recommend focusing storage in one spot. More often than not, the notion that it’s more convenient to keep everything within arm’s reach is a biased assumption.

Many people design their storage layout to match the flow plan within their house, but how do you think that flow plan developed in the first place? In almost every case, flow plan is determined not by what a person does during the day but by where he or she stores things. We may think that we have stored things to suit our behavior, but usually we have unconsciously adjusted our actions to match where things are stored. Laying out storage space to follow the current flow plan will only disperse storage throughout the house. That, in turn, will increase the chances that we will accumulate more possessions and forget what we already have, making life more difficult.

Considering the average size of a Japanese dwelling, a storage layout that follows the flow plan is not going to
make that much difference. If it only takes ten to twenty seconds to walk from one end of your home to the other, do you really need to worry about flow plan?
If you are aiming for an uncluttered room, it is much more important to arrange your storage so that you can tell at a glance where everything is than to worry about the details of who does what, where, and when
.

There is no need to get complicated. Just designate where to keep your things in accordance with the design of your home and your storage problems will be solved. Your house already knows where things belong. This is why the storage method I use is so amazingly simple. To be frank, I can remember where everything is kept in almost all my clients’ homes. That’s how simple my method is. I have never considered the flow plan when helping clients organize, yet none of them has had any problems. On the contrary, once they’ve created a simple storage plan, they never have to ponder where something belongs; it becomes natural to put things away, and consequently, there is no more clutter in the home.

Store everything similar in the same place or in close proximity. Don’t disperse your storage space. If you follow this advice, you will find that you have created a very natural flow plan. There is also no need whatsoever to consider frequency of use when designing storage space. Some books on tidying offer methods that classify things into six levels according to frequency of use: daily, once every three days, once a week, once a month, once a year,
and less than once a year. Am I the only one whose head swims at the very thought of dividing my drawers into six compartments? At the most, I use only two categories for frequency of use: things I use often and things I don’t.

Take the contents of a drawer, for example. You will naturally start keeping the things you use less in the back of the drawer and those you use more in the front. There is no need to decide this when you first lay out your storage space.
When you are choosing what to keep, ask your heart; when you are choosing where to store something, ask your house
. If you remember to do this, you will instinctively know how to proceed with organizing and storing your things.

There are people who stack everything in piles, be it books, papers, or clothes. But this is a great waste. When it comes to storage, vertical is best. I am particularly obsessed with this point. I store every item vertically if possible, including clothes, which I fold and stand on edge in my drawers, and stockings, which I roll up and stand in a box. The same is true for stationary and writing tools: whether boxes of staples, measuring tapes, or erasers, I stand them on edge. I even store my laptop in the bookcase as if it were indeed
a notebook. If you have storage space that should be sufficient yet falls short, try standing things vertically. You’ll find that this solves most problems.

I store things vertically and avoid stacking for two reasons. First, if you stack things, you end up with what seems like inexhaustible storage space. Things can be stacked forever and endlessly on top, which makes it harder to notice the increasing volume. In contrast, when things are stored vertically, any increase takes up space and you will eventually run out of storage area. When you do, you’ll notice, “Ah, I’m starting to accumulate stuff again.”

The other reason is this:
stacking is very hard on the things at the bottom
. When things are piled on top of one another, the things underneath get squished. Stacking weakens and exhausts the things that bear the weight of the pile. Just imagine how you would feel if you were forced to carry a heavy load for hours. Not only that, but the things in the pile virtually disappear because we forget that they even exist. When we pile our clothes one on top of the other, the clothes at the bottom are used less and less frequently. The outfits that no longer thrill my clients even though they loved them at the time of purchase are very often the ones that spent a long time at the bottom of the pile.

This applies to papers and documents as well. As soon as another document is placed on top, the first document recedes a little further from our awareness, and before we know it, we put off dealing with it or even forget about
it altogether. So for these reasons, I recommend storing vertically anything that can be stood up. Try taking a pile you already have and standing it up. Just by doing that you will become more aware of the volume of things in that pile. Vertical storage can be used anywhere. Messy fridges are common, but their contents can be organized quickly and simply by standing things on end. I happen to love carrots, for example. If you open my fridge, you’ll find carrots standing in the drink holders on the door.

The world is full of handy storage items. Adjustable dividers, cloth racks that can be hung from the rod in your closet, narrow shelves that fit into small spaces. You can find storage items you never imagined existed at any store, from the local dollar shop to high-end fancy furniture and housewares stores. I was once a storage fanatic myself, so at one period, I tried just about every item there was on the market, including the weirdest and most exotic. Yet there are almost none left in my house.

The storage items you’ll find in my house are several sets of clear plastic drawers for my clothes and
komono
, a set of cardboard drawers I have used since I was in junior high school, and a rattan basket for my towels. That’s it.
And all of them are kept inside the built-in closet. Other than these, there are the built-in shelves in the kitchen and washroom and the shoe cupboard in the entranceway. I don’t need a bookcase because I store my books and papers on one of the shelves in the shoe cupboard. The built-in closets and shelves, far from being large, are smaller than average. Basically, the only storage items you need are plain old drawers and boxes—you don’t need anything special or fancy.

People often ask me what I recommend, no doubt expecting me to reveal some hitherto secret storage weapon. But I can tell you right now: there is no need to buy dividers or any other gadget. You can solve your storage problems with things you already have in the house. The most common item I use is an empty shoebox. I have tried all kinds of storage products, but have never found any other that is free and still surpasses the shoebox. It gets above average marks for all five of my criteria: size, material, durability, ease of use, and attractiveness. These well-balanced attributes and its versatility are its greatest merits. Shoes come in boxes with cute designs as well. I frequently ask my clients, “Do you have any shoeboxes?” when I visit their homes.

Shoeboxes have infinite uses. I commonly use them to store socks and stockings in drawers. Shoebox height is perfect for standing up rolled stockings. In the washroom, they can be used to store bottles of shampoo, conditioner, etc., and they’re also perfect for holding detergents and
other household cleaning items. In the kitchen, they can be used to stock foodstuffs as well as garbage bags, cloths, and so on. I also use them to hold cake pans, pie plates, and other cooking items that get less frequent use. The box can then be stored on an upper shelf. For some reason, many people seem to store their baking pans in plastic bags, but they are much easier to use when stored in a shoebox. This extremely easy solution is very popular with my clients. I am always pleased when they tell me that they bake more often since reorganizing.

The lid of a shoebox is shallow and can be used like a tray. It can be placed in the cupboard to hold your cooking oils and spices, keeping the base of the cupboard clean. Unlike many shelf liners, these lids don’t slip and are much easier to replace. If you keep cooking utensils such as your ladle and spatula in the kitchen drawers, you can use the shoebox lid to hold them. This keeps the utensils from rolling about noisily in the drawer every time you open and close it, and because it acts as a divider, you can use the remaining space more effectively.

Of course, there are many other types of boxes that make handy storage items. Those that I use most frequently include the plastic cases that hold business cards and those that come with portable music players made by Apple. In fact, the boxes that contain many Apple products are the right size and design for storage, so if you have any, I recommend using them as dividers in your drawers. They are perfect for storing writing tools.
Another standard item is extra plastic food containers, which can be used to store small items in the kitchen.