Konmari Problems: Books (Revisited)

As I mentioned a few days ago, we have some issues with Marie Kondo’s ideas about books.

TW and I talked out some of our issues about how to determine whether a book sparks joy. Defining “joy” and such like that. I had also pretty much decided that we were not going to move all of the books into one room in order to search for sparks of joy. The act of moving all of the books alone would exhaust us physically so much so that we’d probably not be able to sort them until we’d had a few days of rest, after which time the dogs would have eaten the books — and that would not bring us joy. Been there, done that, we’ve worked hard to avoid that happening.

Think about it… in the office, we have five full size Billy bookshelves with the extension units. We have two of the corner style Billy bookshelves with the extension units. Those shelves are full. Some of the shelves have books on top of books and multiple rows of books. We have books on the library cart. Books on the shelves of our desks. A rubbermaid bin of children’s books is also sitting here next to my desk.

In the family room and dining room, we have three more Billy bookshelves (no extenders) full of books. We have books sitting on table tops right next to those bookshelves as well. There are books in our bedroom. There are books upstairs in the girls’ rooms. There are also board books for JMP lurking in the other bedroom.

No way could we move those into one room and survive to look for sparks of joy.

So, I’d decided that we would simply go pull each book off of the shelf, hold it to determine joy factor, and replace on the shelf if we felt the joy. The non-joy-bringing books would then be added to boxes. This modified KonMari seems like it should work for us, right?

Except, TW pointed out that my back has still not fully healed and she did something to her shoulder on Friday. Neither of us is fit to cart books away to the Friends of the Library folks or to the children’s book collector people (whose name I cannot remember at the moment.) Which means if we do books next, our house would be full of boxes of books for… the duration.

That seems problematic.

TW wanted to skip books and come back to it later. I’m a stickler for process and didn’t want to do that.

So, we’re going to do a little bit at a time. We’ll go through a shelf and when we fill up a bag or a box to the point that one of us can safely carry it without injury, we’ll stop. We’ll take that box to the drop off point and then we’ll start where we left off. This means it’s going to take us a long time to KonMari our books.

This also means that I’m going to take TW’s suggestion and move to step 3, paper, while we are working on the books.

Paper is an equally troubling issue here as we have paper EVERYWHERE. I’ll be collecting it all week as I wander around the house and we’ll sort it completely over the weekend. While we’re slowly working through our joyful bookshelves. Pray for us.