Mari Kondo meet Luigi the Travato!

I've got to be out of my mind!  We've been downsizing our house and have 'stuff' piled everywhere--stuff from the attic, guest room closets, Tom's office, my craft room, and don't even get me started about the garage or shed...!  Piles for family, piles for a yard sale, piles for the ReStore,  Good Will, the free pile out at the road, recycling, and more! So why in the midst of all this upheaval do I decide it's time to hoe out our RV?

Well...we bring different stuff in our RV for summer travel than we do for other seasons.  We don't need our little screen house for winter camping on Cape Cod, and definitely won't use winter comforters in South Dakota this summer. Just like our sticks and bricks house,  over time things accumulate in our tiny home on wheels. So with all our downsizing, it just made sense to downsize in Luigi too.

As fans of Marie Kondo's book and her Netflix series,  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,  we followed her advice and removed everything from Luigi.

So the result is that This Happened in our living room!  Not pictured are the mattresses just out of the photo and bedding which was in the washer. But everything else from the van including the cab is in this photo.

It was a mess, but oh, did it feel SO good to take everything out and give Luigi a good cleaning.  If you decide to do the same, don't forget to clean the chassis AC filters, the overhead fans, and if you have a Travato K model, carefully remove the glass guard over the galley cooktop to clean it --the 4 stainless steel bolts unscrew.

Then according to Marie Kondo, only return those items that 'spark joy.'  Here are a few 'after' pictures:

So if I'm honest the broom doesn't spark quite as much joy as the corkscrew does, but clean floors at sandy campsites do!  What did we remove?  Well, a ton a paper surprisingly--lots of maps and tourist brochures from places we've been; a few knitting patterns I'd been missing.  Some sea glass, and pebbles that had been precious at one time. Cluttery things!  In addition some fairly large items like one of the table legs--we use the table all the time to make up the big bed, but never use it as a table.  We kept just one table leg to use with our small table.  We also removed the convection oven wire rack--used it just once for a frozen pizza,  the lid to the dish pan, and the cutting board that sat on top of it, and various other kitchen and junk draw items that wormed their way into the rig but were never used. For a small investment of a rainy Saturday afternoon, we were thrilled with the results.

If you decide to Konmari your RV, what you keep and discard will most likely be totally different than our experience--just do what sparks joy!