Hello, hello! At long last I’ve decided to quit procrastinating and finally get down to organizing my room in preparation for a potential room transfer down in a larger and more spacious bedroom in the basement. While I’m eager to be promoted to a #certified-basement-dweller, I do not look forward to moving all my material possessions down a steep flight of stairs…. And so I’ve decided to downsize my belongings and give away items that ‘no longer spark joy’ as the master Marie Kondo puts it.
To prevent myself from getting overwhelmed and later put aside organizing until the last moment, I thought it would be fun to document the process on my blog and create content out of it! It’ll be a long lengthy process and I do not have the patience to keep this post in the drafts until I’ve completed everything so I’ll be posting this process in a series of parts I’ll upload randomly.

So to kick things off, I will be doing a brief room tour, archiving all the contents of my room before I later decide to dump it or keep it!
It’s probably not the wisest idea to take a bunch of photos detailing my bedroom layout considering I’ve seen some real wacko internet sleuths capable of finding a person’s apartment address based off an image with the doorknobs and baseboards visible, but in the event I some how get doxxed from this innocuous blogpost, please order my pizza with thin crust, extra mushrooms, and no meat, otherwise it will be enjoyed by my brother who will pay it on his dime, please and thank you very much ♥

I debated on whether I should take the photos on my digicam or cellphone, but I eventually settled on the latter since it would be easier to transfer photos from the phone to my PC, along with the image quality being marginally better (just android things lolz).
I also decided not to tidy anything up for the photos so I could capture the state of my bedroom as it is— after all it would do no good for archival purposes if I got carried away with attempting to make my photos more presentable, defeating the whole point of documenting the ‘before’ status of my bedroom!

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Starting off with the entrance of my bedroom, here is an area where I keep all my outdoor stuff such as jackets, purses, bags, or accessories in a convenient area to grab and go when I head out and touch grass.

Room Entrance

✦ Hanger for purses, coats, hats, and jackets
Self explanatory, a place where I store things that can be hanged. Usually its more crowded when it’s winter since I keep a bunch of jackets and cardigans hung up for easy access.

✦ Random Junk
I plan to add a basket to store all my purse contents so I can easily switch between multiple bags without having to rummage for a certain item. My usual go-to products are my phone, wallet, bluetooth earbuds, and my digi-camera. Sometimes I bring my journal, coin purse, or dsi depending on the outing.
Currently the drawer holds some receipts, a book, a pair of leggings, a “cookie” tin, and my favourite purse.

✦ Hand-me-down drawer to hold random stuff
The top drawer stores a large “cookie” tin where I store a bunch of EGL accessories such as bows, wrist cuffs, and headpieces. The bottom drawer stores a bunch of random things like reuseable shopping bags and canvas bags.

✦ Laundry for used scrubs
Self explanatory 2#, I separate my work scrubs from my regular laundry bin to prevent the spread of pathogens on my ordinary clothes. I also wash them often since scrubs are expensive and I can’t be arsed to afford a third pair.

✦ Full-body mirror
A mirror better suited for practical use rather than aesthetics since it’s positioned at an awkward angle that makes full-body photos awkward and unfortunate looking.

Close-up shots:

Purse is from 花心lolita女包 on taobao

✦ My favourite purse
My favourite purse of all time! (In terms of appearance, it’s pretty small so it struggles to hold most of my necessities….)

my keychains. jingle jangle.

✦ My keychain
The chiikawa charm has seen some better days. The back of her head has a dark stain that seems to be growing bigger….

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Next is my utility wall! Various tools are stored on a rollable cart placed beside a bookshelf where I keep all my books and manga.

The “utility” wall

✦  Free Co-op calendar with scenic Canadian sights for each month
Actually I’m not sure if they’re free, I just know that once a year, my dad gets a load of them to place throughout the house and he often chastises me if I try to buy a fancy calendar for myself since he gets plenty of these generic gas station calendars from lord knows where. They’re not too bad actually, this years calendar features various scenic locations throughout Canada.. though I think that applies to all the calendars no matter the year. This month’s scenic location is Peyto Lake in Banff, Alberta! Haven’t visited the lake itself, but I’ve stopped by Banff many times in the past.
As beautiful as all these lakes in Banff are, I really struggle to differentiate between all of them ^.^;
Still better than the murky brown waters they call lakes here in my province….

✦ Reminder 1#
A print-out to remind myself to be a functioning adult human being. I have three of these reminders in my room, an unlucky number which might explain their lackluster effectiveness…. Maybe two more should do the trick.

✦ Posters of cute critters
The first poster is a print out of the thumbnail for Vashti Bunyan’s song “If I Were” on youtube. The illustration of the dog is drawn by the singer’s daughter, Whyn Lewis, who has an affinity for painting greyhounds and whippets. The second poster is a print out of the cover art for Otto Benson’s album “Songs before bed”, the artwork is also painted by the song creator!
There used to be a third poster that filled the empty spot between the reminder and critter posters. It was a picture suggested by someone who was once a friend and ironically it struggled to stick on the wall because the dark ink caused the paper to fold outwards and fall down. The poster was a print out of the cover art for Riot V’s album “Riot: Army of One” and although I personally do not listen to the band’s music, I thought the seal mascot, Johnny the Mighty Tior, is pretty neat. I still have the photo tucked away in a drawer and I plan to re-purpose it in something like a journal page so I don’t waste the copious amount of black ink used to print out the image.

✦ Posters of not so cute critters
Yeah I don’t know how to explain this one. Sometimes I forget I even have those things up there and its always a shock to have a relative come by and they just stare at the wall.
Okay actually so I can explain, and the original context was that I wanted to recreate the decorations of Reigen’s office space, “Spirits and Such Consulting” in my crafting room, which contained a large obnoxious poster of Reigen’s mug on the wall. The first set of posters had a minimum order quantity of 3, but they ended up being way too small…. So now I had 3 posters of Reigen that served absolutely no purpose except radiate an aura of $7 CAD wasted.
Already too deep within the sunk cost fallacy, I decided to splurge on an additional poster with the correct margins this time, giving me 4 Reigen posters in total that I had absolutely no clue what to do with aside from lining them up on my wall and imagining darts launched at their face. Unfortunately Reigen grande was torn up irresponsibly by my brother during our move to a new house, so the three off spring feast on his crushed body for sustenance. Nothing is wasted in this household and the three remaining mistakes stand tall in my current-day bedroom. Watching.

Reigen isn’t even my favourite character btw, that spot belongs to mister ekubo.

Now that John Marston poster beside him. I thought it would be hilarious to print a picture of him out after laughing my ass off at the bounty poster that shows up in town if you end up doing too many crimes in RDR1. Nothing much to say about him aside from an apology to the amount of times I kept feeding him to cougars ingame for fun. Rag doll physics in video games are too funny.

✦ Bear Collection 1#
The way its worded implies I have a bigger and grander second bear collection in my room, but alas this is the bulk of it and I don’t have any intentions of getting any more for the foreseeable future. Stored on the top rack is my coin bank (originally a fruit jelly container that came with a coin slot in the head, reduce reuse recycle) two bear pouches, a broken bear shaped humidifier I bought from aliexpress, and my beloved joke bear coin pouch. As cute as the humidifier is, I might toss it away since it tends to turn off mid-way at night and honestly seems like a massive electrical fire risk since its a random electronic device I bought off aliexpress that had no reviews. The humidifier is probably the one of the worse cases of my consumerism habits making me purchase things for the sake of it being “cute” rather than it having an actual functional use…. Not that theres any shame in buying things that are cute! Cute things should serve to be cute, not potentially explode in your room when its meant to have a practical use.

✦ The most ununtilized utility cart
Okay thats a bit mean, its serving its purpose well by storing my every-day tools in a.. somewhat accessible manner. I’ll talk more about the contents of this cart in-depth in a dedicated section of this blogpost.

✦ Containment shelf of shame
A place to store my ~$65 deluxe edition of Berserk’s first volume— a manga that I am no longer interested or supportive of.
I’m superstitious about saying bad things regarding the recently deceased, but let’s just say I no longer hold any respects for the author. I keep it around with the intent to use as a trump card for anime con swap meets, otherwise I would’ve just sold it for the market price since it’s in good condition anyways.
I still enjoy Guts as a character, though I’d much prefer to buy…… fanworks made by female fans for anything Berserk related.

✦ Regular Books
A shelf to hold my non Nihongo printed literature. An assortment of random books I’ve collected (or snatched) across the years. I plan to downsize them and donate them to a tiny library once I finish reading some of the books.

✦ Manga Shelf
A shelf to hold my Nihongo printed literature. Usually I don’t like purchasing manga since I always feel obligated to collect the entire series.
I also plan to downsize this collection eventually and only keep works that emotionally move me, such as “My Broken Mariko” and Nagata Kabi’s entire bibliography.

✦ Manga that does not fit in my manga shelf
+2 books and a CD that is not necessarily manga. Stacked from bottom to top is a children’s picture book I picked up from a tiny library, a penguin press hardcover edition of dante’s inferno, Vol.1 for Monster, Vol.8 for Black Lagoon, Vol.3 for Trinity Blood, and a yaoi CD.
I might give away the black lagoon volume at a swap meet…. as much as the story influenced a lot of my OC world building, the art doesn’t strike me enough to flip through the pages on a whim and I’m not too particularly interested in Black lagoon’s overarching story. The volume does happen to portray one of my favourite arcs which is Roberta’s blood trail, though I personally enjoy the movie’s adaptation of the manga more since it inflicted actual repercussions to Roberta’s actions near the end. I’m also contemplating on giving away the trinity blood volume, but I haven’t actually read the series itself yet! So I’m still debating on whether the art and story is good enough to keep and later collect.
Everything else I plan to keep, especially the volume of Monster which I hope to collect in full some day. Naoki Urasawa’s artwork is so inspiring and Tenma is one of my favourite fictional characters of all time!
The little Draken acrylic stand is a gift from a friend who bought a tokyo revengers blind bag for me during her trip to Japan. I’m so, so lucky I pulled a character I like cause I’m not sure what I would’ve done if it was a character I disliked, I would hate to give away or hide a gift from a friend!!

Surprisingly I don’t have a name for the lucky cat that protects my hoard of consoomerism. Or maybe she does but I simply forgot. Either way I adore her little lopsided smile. 

Close-up shots:

✦ Manga Shelf
Pictured left to right: Jojo’s Bizzare Adventures: Diamond is Unbreakable, hardcover vol.1-2, A Bride’s Tale vol. 11, Kaoru Mori’s Scribbles vol.2, My Broken Mariko, Land of the Lustrous vol.10, a variety of Nagata Kabi works (i.e. My lesbian experience with loneliness, My Solo Exchange Diary vol.1-2, My pancreas broke but my life got better), The girl that can’t get a girlfriend, The apothecary diaries vol.1, and Gintama vol.58 and 76.

✦ Regular Books
Pictured left to right: The Silmarillion, Lord of the Rings book 1 (book from my grade 8 classroom library that I forgot to return), The metamorphosis and other short stories + the metamorphosis (stand-alone story), crush by Richard Siken, Annie on my Mind, Harry Potter and the half-blood prince, The girl who was supposed to die (a book I bought on a whim during the schoolastic book fair, probably one of my favourite books of all time), Sati the blessing and the curse: the burning wives of india, The peony season, The story ends begins when the story ends (book from highschool ELA class that I also forgot to return)

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Here is a close-up of my utility cart! On the first tier is my bear memorabilia collection, some random junk and trinkets I’ve collected, and a drawer to store electronic devices and bandaids.

✦ Coin bank
Self explanatory, I put coins in it! Sometimes I also place dollar bills of non-Canadian currencies (i.e. USD, MXN) and folded up fortune cookie fortunes inside.

✦ Humidifier
The dubious aliexpress humidifier that I bought from a listing with no reviews. Its a sheer miracle that it arrived looking like the product listing and somewhat worked as intended….. at first.
I bought it about 2-3 years ago and haven’t used it since…. I’m afraid to plug it in.

✦ Makeup pouch
I don’t wear makeup often, and usually my go-to purse is way too small to hold the whole bear pouch alongside my necessities, so I what I usually do is take out what I need and cram it in the open crevices of my bag.

Inside my makeup pouch!

Inside my makeup pouch is a pocket mirror, eyelash curler (held together by a hair tie since the acrylic piece that keeps it closed broke), Dior lip glow oil in poppy coral, canmake secret beauty powder in clear, 3CE mini multi eye colour palette in second pair, Kissme heroine waterproof mascara (my makeup holy grail), Clinique almost lipstick in black honey, and a mascara wand.

✦ Coin Purses
I don’t use the brown bear purse much— currently it holds some probably expired doraemon gum that I should either toss or use. I bought it off aliexpress and it came with a bunch of loose embroidery threads that I had to trim.
I really really like the joke bear coin purse, it’s always fun to whip it out and use to store spare change. I brought it off a second-hand listing on Japan. This one really sparks joy and I hope to use it more often.

the cutest coin pouch in the world ♥︎

✦ Random Stuff….
Random bullshit go! Just some unsorted objects that I don’t have a place for.
Theres some deodorant, a glasses wipe, a seashell from Cancun, a glasses case, the lid of a glasses spray bottle, and a peeps water bottle that I bought from target. I have no idea what to do with the peep water bottle since the reservoir itself is really tiny…. it can probably hold like 4 sips of liquid at most. It came with a straw but I stored it away since it wasn’t cute. I might use it to hold paint water or something, but it seems like a pain to clean. Another object I’m guilty of buying simply because it’s “cute”.

✦ Random razor??
Surprisingly not used to shave hair— I mostly use it to remove pilling on fabric.

✦ Storage drawer
Dollarama storage drawer that stores 90% electronic components and parts, 5% random bullshit, and 5% bandaids of varying sizes.

The top drawer; fly high old pop-socket that was taped, glued, and melded on the phone case throughout the years. The sides of the base were cut off so it could fit the slot in the phone case

The top drawer has various charging blocks, a broken USB with all my highschool art and twitter archives on it RIP, a case for my hearing aids, and an old phone case.

The middle drawer. Taking this picture I realized I finally found the tape corrector I’ve been searching for everywhere….

The bottom drawer….. random bullshit GO!

The bottom drawer stores some random electronic junk like a dual headphone splitter for when me and my sister watch shows together on my computer (I don’t use speakers since I have a hard time hearing the audio with ambient noise in the background), my keyboard manual, some broken earbud pieces, spare earbud pads, a spare phone case ring, and some spare plastic ties that come with packaging.

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This is the middle tier of the cart! It’s getting a bit more disorganized, but this is where I store things like electronics and objects that don’t fit the top shelf. I forgot to label the big cork trivet I use for when I eat noodles in my room; a habit I’ve been meaning to break since I want to eat in the dining room with my family more.

✦ Random electronics
A storage bin that holds some electronic devices such as my air duster, my polaroid camera, and various command hooks, which isn’t an electronic device but I had no other place to store them soooo….

Photos of my late dog, Angel. fly high sweet baby ♥

My polaroid is a teal? blue?? green???? (in my mom’s words) instax mini 9 that was gifted to me as a christmas gift from my cousin years ago. I rarely use it since refills are pretty pricy and its hard to lug around, but its always fun to bring when I want to gift momentos to comm members during lolita meet-ups! Although my favourite colours these days are reds and white, I still enjoy the light blue colour my cousin picked that she likely based off my bedroom wall colour at the time.

✦ Emergency pouch
Not really a first-aid kit, but it stores some various supplies in case of small emergencies such as bandaids, a tide pen (an essential for all women fashionable!!), mini scissors, after bite oinment, and some expired advil liqui-gel pills that I really need to replace ^.^;
I used to store a pot of aloe vera as well for sun burns, but the aloe vera evaporated and turned into a ball of putty that I had to throw away……

✦ Binoculars case
Its empty at the moment since I accidentally fell into a body of water with the binoculars on. Water ended up in the inner lenses of the binoculars and I’m attempting to fix it by storing the binoculars in a zip-loc baggie filled with silica packets I’ve accumulated from my dried seaweed addiction. Thank goodness I decided to bring my binoculars instead of my digicam when I went out to paddle board for the first time, I don’t know what I would’ve done if my beloved camera broke to water damage.

✦ Wires box
A box where I used to store most of my charging wires. Nowadays I keep most of them in a box beside my desk for easy access. The container is currently missing its lid which is bugging me a lot!

✦ Makkachin ♥
An absolute holy grail I never imagined I could ever obtain. I got him through sheer luck at an anime con swap meet that I gladly traded over some generic miku prize figure that was purchased on a whim to balance out the shipping fees of a mandarake order (which btw, never order from Mandarke directly, they only have a fixed selection of box sizes that costs $38 CAD minimum in shipping no matter how small your products. Buy from a proxy service so you don’t have to pay insane shipping costs.)
I’m so glad I decided not to sell her since I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten the tissue box for any of the other items I had in my swap meep selection, I’m so lucky!!!!

The moment I saw the Makkachin tissue box in the anime it has been a dream of mine to obtain a physical version of it someday. But alas, my hopes were dashed by the time I had the disposable income to purchase anime merch, since most most official YOI listings online no longer stocked the Makkachin tissue box anymore due to MAPPA hating making money and MAPPA especially hating YOI (never forgiving them for what they did to ice adolescence. Worst random Thursday of my life).
I honestly forgot its existence for a while until I stumbled across it randomly in the anime con swap hall. Coincidentally the original owner was a member of my lolita comm! She also gave me a YOI acrylic charm alongside the tissue box, which is already super generous considering I was trading a mere prize figure for it. I owe my life to her for graciously entrusting the Makkachin to me, I’ll cherish him forever.

Its a bit tricky to refill the holder with tissues since the plush struggled to fit over the cardboard box itself.. You have to remove the tissues directly, halve it, and then attempt to cram it in Makkachin’s belly.
It’s honestly worth the struggle since it makes media crying sessions so much more fun when I have Makkachin to cuddle with while I sob.

No longer feeling like pure shit….. using the tissues from the Makkachin tissue box to wipe

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And finally…. the bottom shelf. Not much to say about it other than it being a complete mess I can’t be arsed to organize better. Random bullshit go.

✦ Horrible hand vacuum
Okay thats pretty mean also….. I feel like I’m going to jinx it and break down my vacuum because of this…. but I’m not lying when I say it sucks to use! Ever since I grew out my hair, I began to shed like crazy! Which in turn causes a bunch of stray hairs to build up on my floor. A full-sized vacuum could probably do a better job of cleaning it up, but I hate having to lug it from the storage closet and roll it to my room, then lug it back when I’m done.
The issue with trading convenience over efficiency however is that it places a massive strain on my back whenever I use the hand vacuum to clean the floor! Even with school-taught proper body mechanics! Although the hand vacuum serves its purpose, it’s a pain!! literally!!!!
If I had to invest in an actual vacuum I would want it to be something cute like a henry hoover so I’m slightly less annoyed when I have to roll the heavy thing across the house.

✦ Scented sprays
Bottles of scented sprays. The white bottle is a lavons fabric freshener in the scent luxury flower; I primarily use it to spray down lolita dresses after wearing them out since I only fully machine wash dresses when needed. The smell is pretty strong and I’m not a fan of perfumes in detergent so I usually air out the dress until the smell goes away before wearing it again. Honestly I’m not sure if the fabric freshener actually kills the bacteria and sweat that causes odours in clothes, but it does seem to be effective even with the scent gone.

The black bottle is a John’s blend room mist in the scent white musk, which is probably one of my favourite scents of all time!
The first product I bought from the brand was a reed diffuser bottle from a local Japanese products vendor. When the liquid ran out the shop unfortunately stopped stocking the incense bottles to my dismay. The closest equivalent of that prodcut was a strange fragrance gel that didn’t last as long as the diffuser liquid and quickly shrivelled up into a husk in the bottom of the jar. The same store also stopped stocking those fragrance gels too, and the only product left was the room mist. I tried to salvage the fragrance gel by pouring out the liquid of the room mist into the jar, but I honestly couldn’t notice a difference between leaving the jar out vs spraying the room with the mist itself.
I think the local shop stopped selling the toiletries from John’s blend entirely and only stocks the beauty products such as shampoo and body wash.
Nowadays I buy the products online via a proxy service, likethe hand cream which I’ve been enjoying a lot!

✦ Hearing aids equipment case
A large bulky box to safely store my hearing aids alongside various equipment and replacement parts. I never used this box for travelling since I mainly carry the hearing aids in its charging case though I should probably be more careful with them now that my insurance no longer covers it and the replacement would cost upwards of $6k CAD…..
I mostly use the box to store replacement ear domes and wax protectors that I keep in surplus now that I’ve aged out my previous audiologist’s care.

✦ Travelling pouch & face masks
A pouch I use to store travel toiletries and makeup for when I go on vacation.
Usually its empty aside from the mini shampoo bottles that are just re-potted &honey shampoo + conditioner. Can’t vouch for its effectiveness since I mainly use it for the smell.
The face masks are byproducts from a time in the pandemic where I wanted to look cool by having fancy black face masks unlike everyone else’s boring blue surgical masks. I’m pretty sure face masks expire so my current stock isn’t as effective for disease prevention, but I sometimes wear them when it’s smoky outside (recently we’ve been having frequent wild fires in my province which results in a lot of ambient smoke outside….)

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This post is ending up WAYY longer than I anticipated, and I haven’t even gotten to the main part of my room which is my loft bed and computer desk! There’s so much more I have to cover in those areas, and a lot more to write up, so I’ll end this first part here as to not present my readers with a behemoth of a blogpost to slog through.
I hope my very un-kawaii room set-up was interesting to read about as I certainly had fun reminiscing on all the memories relating to each belonging. I can’t wait to think about everything more thoroughly when I get to cleaning up my room! (however far off in the future that will be….)
Stay tuned for part 2 where I will cover the contents of my primarily working space and loft bed!

(UPDATE: 23/12/2025)
I really do not feel like writing up the 2nd part, in fact as of writing this update I have already switched rooms and organized everything accordingly in my new space. It’s a bit of a shame since the work space is the heart of my bedroom, but dropping the project makes sense considering I can no longer take pictures or re-examine areas for reference. I don’t really feel like making a write up for my current living space either since everything is set up and stored haphazardly, and the amount of clutter drives me nuts. I can hardly stand to look at it, never mind writing about it. Maybe if I do a massive decluttering and reduce my material items I’ll reconsider. Perhaps another time…..

Lori ✦