I’ve received several emails and phone calls from people who have cleaned up their closets, but it seems like many of you are too shy to submit a before picture! That’s okay – the main goal of the project is to clear out the clothes that respresent the old you, not the current you.
Because isn’t your current ‘you’ the best ‘you’ yet?
Photo by Darwin Bell
There has been a lot of great discussion over this topic, though most of it has come via email. So I’ll recap some of the discussion points below.
- Timelines: When you have a ‘maybe’ item, you can set up your own timeline. Some of us have more clothes than others, and we all live in different climates. The important thing is to be aware of the clothes you have and are actually wearing and make a decision on what stays and goes in your closet in your own timeline. And some things will pass the timeline and you still decide to keep them. That’s okay. Its YOUR closet.
- Memory clothes: We all have them – the dress we wore on a great date, the skinny jeans we wore when we lost all that weight (before gaining it back), and maybe even a prom dress or letter jacket from high school. Should these really be in your everyday closet? One reader suggested taking pictures of these items (or maybe a picture of you wearing them from way back?) and taping them to the inside of the closet door. You can then either store the items or donate/sell them, but either way they are out of the way of getting dressed every morning.
- What if I don’t have a closet? If you live in an older home you often inherit small or nonexistent closet space along with the charm. In this case, you just apply the same rules to your armoires and dressers as you would your closet, turning items backward if you haven’t worn them in a while.
Remember, most people only wear 20% of what is hanging in their closets. I thought I had really pared down, and when I did the backward-hanger exercise for clothes that have not been worn recently I was surprised to find how many were hanging in my closet!
Donate or Sell Your Clothes
- Good Will
- Churches
- Dress for Success
- Consignment shops
- Clothing Swaps
One of our readers has a great blog on living a non-consumer lifestyle for a year, and she runs a series on dressing well through Good Will. You’ll be inspired and surprised at what her frugal readers find, and highly recommend her blog: My Year Without Spending.
Contest Deadline Approaching
For those of you interested in cleaning out your closet and winning $50 for doing so, please read the rules and send me your photos by Monday, April 27 at 5 pm Pacific. Howard is in the lead now, and it would be a shame to let him win with no competition.
Next week we’ll talk about bathrooms, cleaning products, and decluttering/organization websites before moving into May’s theme, which is MONEY. We’ve got some good stuff on the way with guest bloggers and a new contest. Stay tuned!
About Betsy
Thanks for mentioning my blog. It’s been fun to see what great clothes people have been able to find at the Goodwill and thrift stores.
I also love clothing swaps. I have hosted one for the past two years in the fall, and they’ve been a huge success. My girlfriends haven’t needed to shop for clothes since we started, and we’re all very fashionably dressed. One of them calls it "shopping at Auntie Ang’s." Imagine leaving the house with a bag of clothes you don’t wear and coming home with all kinds of clothes you love and that fit you perfectly. We don’t bring clothes that are out of fashion, worn out, or need repair. Just great stuff that we’re not wearing for one reason or another.
One other comment: I do save "memory" clothes, but they’re in an armoire in the basement with my "out of season" clothes. Our space is too small to be cluttered up with stuff not in immediate use. I have an idea that quilting will be my craft of choice if I’m so lucky to reach old age, so I like keeping my favorite items in case that actually becomes a reality.
Great tips! Here’s a good way to handle those "maybe" items….arrange the clothes hanging in your closet so that all of the hangers are facing in the same direction. As you wear and item and return it to your closet, turn the hanger so that it is facing in the opposite direction. Six months from now (or whatever timeline you choose to use), you will know, at-a-glance, that anything on a hanger that is still facing in the original direction, you have not worn in 6 months….and, of course, if haven’t worn it in 6 months, it needs to be removed from your closet!
I have just had a declutter of my wardrobe on Friday. It coincided with me changing my clothes over for the autumn/summer season.
I wish I had seen your post prior to my declutter so that I could have taken "before" photos.
However, it looks great now and I am enjoying selecting my outfits each day, as I can clearly see every thing and I know that everything hanging in my wardrobe is something I love, it fits me and the colour suits me.
Non Consumer Girl, I love that you change over your clothes for the seasons. This is something I’ve never been able to do well, either due to lack of space or lack of motivation.
Tracy, your suggestion is just the opposite of what I wrote about in the post – it seems easier to put things you haven’t worn facing the other direction so it is easier to hang clothes and get dressed in the morning. But either way you decide to do it, making it obvious what is being worn and what isn’t is the key to decluttering.
Angela, what a great idea for your memory clothes! I like that they can become part of something you will actually use regularly, like a quilt. And I hope more people take advantage of clothing swaps – they are really so much fun, and one woman’s trash is literally another woman’s treasure!