Happy New Year! Que the obligatory organizing post!
No doubt you're already inundated with tips, tricks, and totally nuclear ways to declutter and organize your home. Well, here's another that you'll definitely want to check out!
Laura from I'm an Organizing Junkie is one of the queen's of a streamlined home, and there's no beating around the bush with her! Now that the holidays are over, and I no longer have the excuse that I just moved into our new house, I officially have begun Project Decluttify.
Project Decluttify's first step to streamlined sanity is dealing with our mounds, and I mean MOUNDS, of clothing. Each member of our family somehow has ridiculous amounts of clothing that we do not wear, yet remain to make our morning dressing routine less like The Devil Wears Prada and a bit more like Hoarders: Buried Alive.
When you move, you suddenly realize you don't want to unpack half the stuff you brought with you. Also, you grit your teeth and maybe shed a tear when you think of cluttering up your lovely empty new house.
Clothes are my bane.
I looooove dressing and looking cute, but I have a hard time getting rid of things I no longer wear, especially when they're practically new. But, in the effort to love my home and keep it functional, I have devised a few systems to help maintain the clutter, including my mantra of,
"A place for everything, and everything in it's' place."
Whether you're living in a 400 sq ft studio, or a 7000 sq ft estate, if you don't have a place for the things you own, it's going to feel messy and stress-inducing.
Ditching the Excess
To start us off, I'm sharing some of Laura's awesome, straight-forward tips for ridding yourself of unnecessary clothing. (Many of these tips apply to other items, so read on!)
- If you haven’t worn something in a year then out it goes regardless of condition, price or size. Why a year? Because you cover every season in that period of time. If you haven’t worn it during the year, you probably never will.
- If you have a piece of clothing that you wear but are annoyed with it every time you do, seriously stop it.
- I’m not opposed to keeping your “skinny” clothes (and I know we all do it) but for goodness sakes you don’t need to keep all of it. Styles change, your tastes change, your body shape changes so chances are good that when you get back to that size you’re going to want new stuff anyway.
- Sentimental clothes that you aren’t wearing shouldn’t reside in your closet. Either take a picture of it and preserve the memory or limit yourself to one tote of “clothes to show my kids so they can laugh their heads off at me someday”.
- Don’t hang onto something that is “just alright” because you don’t have something better yet to replace it. Let it go now unless it means you go naked, that wouldn’t be right.
- Try everything on. This one I can’t stress enough. Do not hold something up and say oh this is so beautiful I’m going to keep it. That’s too easy and what you might not remember is that, although it’s beautiful, the buttons gape at the front showing off your woman parts. Nope we don’t want that now do we. Get rid of it.
- You only have the space that you do. Jamming your clothes into the closet and fighting with them every single day to find what you need won’t make your closet grow in the night. It will only make you grumpy…every single day. It’s not worth it.
For the full list, be sure to check out I'm An Organizing Junkie!
2/13/14