LOVE is the answer when it comes to an organised house.
Marie Kondo has turned organising lore on its head with her exhortation to keep only what you love, then treat those items with respect.
The Japanese professional organiser has three three books on organising, including The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising.
Her method of organising is known as the KonMari method, and consists of gathering together everything you own and then keeping only those things which "spark joy", discarding the rest.
"But if we sort by category — clothes one day, books the next — laying each of these things out, we can see what we have, and therefore what we need to discard."
- Marie Kondo
A natural organiser from childhood, she experienced a breakthrough one day.
"One day, I realised my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out," she said. "What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep.
"Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan forced people to reconsider their priorities, which was when the principles in Ms Kondo's book came into their own.
People were forced to think about what was important in their lives, the true value of sentimental items, the meaning of the things they'd lost.
Perhaps the best thing that demonstrates the so-called Konmari method is the treatment of socks: rolling them up in balls and folding one over the other. They do a good job and should be treated better," she said.
"[So they] should be folded carefully, and allowed to rest after a job well done."
Ms Kondo also exhorts followers (they call themselves Konverts) to tidy by category, not by room. She said by tidying one room at a time, "we can never grasp the overall volume and therefore can never finish".
While this may fly in the face of conventional sorting wisdom, it is crucial to achieving organising success according to Ms Kondo.
"Excess is caused by ignorance of what we actually own," she said.
"But if we sort by category — clothes one day, books the next — laying each of these things out, we can see what we have, and therefore what we need to discard."
