Mise en place is the French concept of “everything in its place” a place for everything and a distinct role and purpose and home for everything. It marries well with the Mari Kondo Magic Art of Tidying Up. It also defines one of my core principles. And has created culture shock waves in our home when I have discovered things out of place… gone missing? How is that possible? Use. Clean. Replace. The kitchen scissors! If not in action, they have but one place: the kitchen scissors drawer! Questions?

So, while Lake has been enjoying special grandparents time this week, I’ve been busy with a KonMari Tidying Festival. Labor Day was spent in real efforts to corral the paperwork and get all the files mis en place. Readers may remember me KonMari’ing our condo New Year 2016 before Lake arrived and again for New Year 2017 here at the new house. Her method is meant to be such a complete experience so that only once is sufficient. Well, there were some significant holes in my first mid en place with the archives as discussed in Magical Tidying . For starters, Lake wasn’t born yet and now he has a growing number of files that have no home, really. Secondly, a large file cabinet (twice as large as the one shown and tidied in 2017) was still yet being generously held in deep storage. Thirdly, I never did make it to KondMari’ing my sentimental objects. All the cards, letters, memorabilia and photos.

So my goal this week was to focus on the papers and create a French style archive for our Home Sweet Maison (inspirational source by Danielle Postel-Vinay). Each topic is separately filed in a clearly labeled binder containing the family’s important documents sleeved neatly inside clear plastic sheets. In organizing our family archives this week, a large part of the process was sorting through old papers from school days at Bastyr University and my start-up business The SPAhT. Which in a way becomes sorting through sentimental objects. A bit slow going when you’re out of practice with the joy of Tidying and jumping in mid-process to attempt to give our papers a true mis en place as our Home’s archives.

I’m so grateful for my parents in so many ways. Not only are they keeping Lake so that I have the time energy and bandwidth to tackle this Tidying Festival, but I am reminded they have also helped me move so many times! and stored these files for so many years, and finally after a decade, they even brought them to me so that I would be able to sort through them at my leisure.

Thank you NanaBaba! Let’s see if I can wrap my project this morning before they bring Lake home today!