Since having a baby, my house has felt increasingly cluttered and disorganized. Often, over the past two years, I have considered doing a Marie Kondo tidy challenge to get everything in order.

I even tried starting it a few times, only to lose steam and give up after a week or so.

Last year, I loved watching the Marie Kondo show that was on Netflix. I flew through all the episodes in a few weeks.

The significant change in their homes made a huge impact on me and it made me want to do this in my own home. I’ve never been able to dedicate the time this sort of organizing takes to finish up the work.

Now, I will start again, this time in hopes of completing the full challenge.

A few months ago, Marie Kondo posted the 8-week tidy challenge on her website and invited everyone to join along. I didn’t hear about the challenge until after it was complete, but I found the idea intriguing.

It gave more of a timeline than was provided in the books or shows and broke everything out into more manageable steps. A simple list for each day and week makes the tasks seem less daunting.

Day 1: Review the Basics of Tidying Up

The key in Day 1 of the tidy challenge is to review the basics from her books. Right in the challenge, it links you to the Marie Kondo Six Rules of Tidying.

Since I’ve already read both of her books, these were a good quick refresher for me.

1. Commit Yourself to Tidying Up
2. Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle
3. Finish Discarding First
4. Tidy by Category, Not Location
5. Follow the Right Order
6. Ask Yourself if it Sparks Joy

If you need more details on these, you can find a little bit more detail on her website.

If you’d rather read her books, they are The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up goes over her method in detail. The Spark Joy book goes into even more detail, specifically getting into how to determine which items to keep and which to get rid of. This one is particularly good if you need more help learning what “spark joy” means to you.

Day 2: Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle

For this day, she suggests journaling to plan out your ideal lifestyle. She also says to be specific.

Here is my journal for Day 2 of the Tidy Challenge:

My ideal house does not have miscellaneous clutter laying around. The items out in my house will be items that have meaning to me and that I enjoy looking at in the space.

There is not a theme in my house. My main goal is for it to feel cozy and welcoming. For me, this means nice earthy tones and various textures that bring that feeling in.

I prefer my house to not have a smell. I have 3 pets, so I’m always concerned that my house smells like animals. I also tend not to have other overwhelming scents in my house, since they tend to give me headaches.

During certain seasons, I do burn some candles. Right now, since it is December, my main scent will be “Fresh Balsam”, so it smells like a real Christmas tree.

I also like to have lots of natural lighting in my house. I tend to keep the curtains open during the day for this reason. I also have lots of lights in the living room to brighten it up at night.

I would like my home to be filled with the items my family finds useful and enjoys on a regular basis.

Day 3: Imagine Your Ideal Emotional State

After I complete this tidy challenge, I hope to feel calm and be able to focus.

Since I now work from home permanently, I do not get the luxury of getting away from the clutter during the day for work.

It does tend to be distracting when I’m working during the day and currently makes me feel anxious seeing it all the time.

I also feel this overwhelm by all the stuff in my house, especially since I know there is so much that I do not use. This feeling of overwhelm and holding on to useless items is what is motivating me to tidy.

That and wanting to have a more enjoyable overall space since I am now in the house all of the time.

I hope to gain a nice welcoming house that I actually want to be in. Right now, I do not find it enjoyable to be here as much as I am. With Covid, it is hard to get out and away from the space.

Day 4: Clarify Your Goals

Day 4 of the Marie Kondo 8 Week Tidying Challenge states to clarify what you want your goals to be. This will help keep you focused and motivated on completing the task. Below is my list.

1. Get rid of items no longer used on a regular basis or that do not bring me joy
2. Create a calming space and more enjoyable place to live and work
3. Be able to better easily find items when I’m looking for them
4. Have a place for everything
5. Create a space full of items my family loves
6. Get rid of the guilty feeling of holding on to items no longer needed

Day 5: Make a Vision Board

For day 5 of the tidy challenge, Marie Kondo recommends creating a board that represents your ideal lifestyle using pictures and words.

I already had a few vision boards similar to this created on my personal Pinterest account.

The two boards that I will refer back to during this challenge are my Dream Home Board and my For the Home Board.

The “Dream Home Board” does tend to have more floor plans on it, but there are some pictures of certain rooms that are just perfect for my ideal space.

The “For the Home Board” focuses more on home décor and specific rooms, which is more of what I would like my house to look like in the future. There are lots of good organizational ideas out there as well.

Day 6 & 7: Take Before Pictures

For these two days, Marie Kondo suggests taking pictures of all your spaces and keeping them together in one folder. She also notes to not organize the spaces beforehand.

Below are some of our before pictures.

These are particularly bad because of the combination of holiday decorations and the fact that we haven’t done a good tidy night in a few weeks.

What I mean by tidy night above, is that it is our goal to have one night a week to spend about 15 minutes picking up stuff around the house.

Doing this regularly has made our house feel a lot more manageable. However, we do tend to slack on it when our lives get busy.

Additional Items to Consider for the Tidy Challenge

One item not noted in the description of the challenge is handling other family members. This is covered in more detail in her books and in her Netflix show.

The best method is to have everyone in the family on board with the challenge. However, if someone in the house doesn’t want to partake, there is nothing you can do about that.

The plan if someone doesn’t want to join in on the challenge is to organize your items only. You can also organize and remove as many of the joint items as you and your other family members agree upon.

If you read the books or watch the show, Marie Kondo even gets into involving children in the tidying process.

For the purpose of this challenge, my husband is on board. This will make the tidying of joint areas of the house much more seamless.

Since our daughter is only 2 and very hands on, we have opted out of having her join in on the challenge at this time. As noted above, Marie Kondo does have more details on including young children in on these challenges, but I am choosing to differ from her instruction here.

Take the Tidy Challenge With Me!

There is no time better than the present to start tidying up your house. I usually try to clear out my house around the holidays anyway, so the timing works out perfectly for me.

The Marie Kondo 8 Week Tidy Challenge is a manageable and nicely organized way to get into tidying your house.

I invite you to join in this challenge with me. Please share the goals for your house and what you hope to aspire towards.