Here’s a little tidbit about me that some people (read: my husband) find quite un-endearing: I have a really, really hard time spending money on non-essential items. What often happens in my house is that my husband will suggest a purchase, and no matter how minor, I rail against it. Spotify, for example. Why would we need Spotify, I argued passionately, We already have Sirius! Or the Roomba. We don’t need a Roomba, we have a vacuum!
Well, over the course of our marriage, my husband has learned to just make the purchase, which I subsequently fall in love with. Like, I cannot imagine how I actually did workouts before without Spotify. And Roomba? Roomba, as I’ve mentioned before, is now my favourite child. Everyone in the house talks about Roomba as if he is a living, breathing person who exists only to clean our floors. Great job, Roomba! we all say as Roomba whirrs around. Oh, Roomba, you got into the cords again! we will gently chide him as we see an extension cord pulled out from under the bed. Even Barkley has learned to live with Roomba, even though his tail was once almost vacuumed, causing him to now watch warily when the whirring starts.
It naturally follows that if a person has a hard time spending money on non-essential items, then that person should have – in theory – a fairly empty closet. Right? Well, it appears that clothing is essential and that I have far, far too much of it, if my exploding closet and drawers are any indication.
The “yoga clothes and beach wear” portion of my closet.
The problem is that I like clothes, and I buy quality, long-lasting clothes, which means I have a lot of clothes. I mean, I have yoga pants from 2008 that still look fantastic, I have classic black dresses purchased between 2011-2014 that are always in style, and I have very well-cared for sweaters from the now-defunct but much loved Jacob.
Everyone has been talking about the KonMari method of tidying up; yesterday was a PD day and I was looking for a project, so I thought I would re-organize my closet. Although I am a very organized (read: anal) person in general, my closet was getting a little small and cluttered. Now, I knew the rules: if an item was used and brought joy, then it could stay. Otherwise, it would get purged.
How much beach wear is too much beach wear, when one does not live anywhere near a beach?
Do you know, all of my clothing brings me joy?
Reader, I couldn’t bear to part with a thing yesterday. I regularly comb through my dressers whenever I get a phone call asking for clothing donations for this charity or that one, and I usually can gather a good solid garbage bag full. But perhaps I’ve gone to that well too often, or perhaps yesterday was the wrong day to go through my things, I don’t know. All I know is that after putting everything in a giant pile, I ended up neatly rolling everything up and putting it back in the closet. I found a couple of unused containers and I rolled each bikini piece together, Kondo-like. (Who needs fourteen bikinis, mostly black? I DO. I need ALL the black bikinis.)
It’s marginally neater!
So that was a bit of a fail. Not only did I go through my closet, but I also cleaned out my dressers and the same thing occurred; I couldn’t bear to part with any items at all. Well, on the upside, everything is now neatly put away. On the downside, I still need to deal with my shoes and boots, and that, my friends, is going to be a test.
I would fail at KonMari, too. I still have a lot of the kids’ baby clothes, which drives Beth crazy. I packed up some toddler clothes today for my sister and some more for Beth’s cousin who just had a baby, but it made a rather small dent in the collection.
That might actually be a KonMari WIN – one thing I really liked about that book was that she has absolutely no interest in designating how much stuff you should have (which is good, as I’m pretty sure that my optimal stuff level is considerably higher than hers) – it’s all about not feeling burdened by excess stuff – the stuff you never use and feel guilty for never using. If all your clothes bring you joy, then you probably don’t feel depressed or overwhelmed by your closet. Have you tried sorting your clothes vertically? That’s her other thing (once you’ve gotten down to only the things that you love) – fold them so they stand up (usually that means in thirds rather than in half) and then arrange them front to back in the drawer, brightest colours towards the front, or left to right in cubbies the like the one in your photo, brightest colours on the right.
It makes me joyful that you have twenty mostly-black bikinis. And I didn’t sleep last night, so very little makes me joyful right now.
I am a purger, always have been. Yet, I think I’ve hit a place where I purge fewer and fewer of my clothes due to the confluence of a few factors: (1) I work in a conservative profession where styles change some but not really enough that my older suits go dramatically out of style for quite awhile, (2) aside from pregnancy I’ve been roughly the same size for years, and (3) I finally hit a place about a decade ago where I decided I would no longer buy cheap stuff and instead buy fewer quality pieces that last. These days the only clothes I find myself purging are older things I bought back when I was still buying for quantity rather than quality and the things I’ve actually managed to wear out (I’m looking at you zumba pants from 2007). Instead I get my purging needs met by culling my kids’ clothes regularly – they’re constantly growing out of stuff 🙂
I’m with Allison – “Who needs fourteen bikinis, mostly black? I DO. I need ALL the black bikinis.” HA! Also: TRUE DAT.
Oops! That was me commenting above. I was accidentally logged in as a design client! Feel free to delete, or else I will explain to Elizabeth why she is now known on the web for saying TRUE DAT. 🙂
Sounds like you missed the first step: envision your home tidy and dig into WHY you want to tidy it. That may have helped.