Well the seasons are a changin’ now and the days are getting cooler here in the land down under. The winter woolies (clothing) have started to make an appearance and some of them are just not living up to expectation. I pulled a sweater out of the drawer today and within ten minutes I had had enough of the scratchiness of it so I took it off and put it in the donation box.
Winter can be uncomfortable enough especially when it is wet as well as cool like it has been here for the last two weeks so the last thing I need is to be made more irritated by clothes that don’t feel nice or are just not user friendly. As the cooler weather continues and I start to make my way through my winter wardrobe I will be assessing as I go and anything that doesn’t pass the comfort test will not make it’s way back into my closet.
…Is it obvious I am suffering from a little cabin fever at the moment? I am missing my early morning walks for their fresh air and sunshine that gets my day going. If the weather doesn’t improve soon I am just going to have to buy a raincoat and rubber boots and start walking rain, hail or shine. Anyway now that I have got that out of my system….
Lets call the selection process above Natural Progression Decluttering. Instead of wasting a couple of hours going through my closet trying on my winter clothes and eliminating the ones that don’t make the cut I will just judge them as I get to them. I wish all my delcuttering was this easy at least that is something to be cheerful about. I will have to see if there is anything else I can adopt this strategy with.
ITEM 153 OF 365 LESS THINGS
Here is the sweater mentioned above it was not a thing of beauty so it will be no great loss
Oh, I like that idea–natural progression decluttering! Somewhere, I’m not sue where, I pulled the idea of putting all my hanging clothes backward in the closet. At the end of the season, I will KNOW which clothes I didn’t wear. They will be the ones still hanging on backwards hangers.
Willow what a brilliant idea I think that would come under the Natural Progression Decluttering heading. I think I will go and do that now.
Colleen & Willow, I read about the backwards hangers as well and incorporated the idea this past winter with our clothing. It is an easy and effective method to clear out your closet painlessly. This spring when I changed out the winter wardrobe to the summer wardrobe, the clothing on backward facing hangers went into a bag to give away/sell and I hung the summer clothing in the same way. My husband was rather confused about the backwards hangers at first until I explain the method to my madness! Another idea I’ve tried is to use hangers of one color throughout the closet and as the clothes are worn and laundered, the hangers are replaced with a different color. The first idea is much easier and requires fewer hangers.
Thanks Di, I will make a post of this in the next couple of days as these ideas often get lost in the endless whirl of blogs etc and sometimes ideas need to be reintroduced.
I share a smallish bedroom closet with my husband, so cannot have all my clothes in it at one time, even after getting rid of nearly half my wardrobe (yikes). But I’ve got a tiny spare closet in my studio where I can keep a lot of things. In the past two years it has ended up working very similarly to the backwards-hanging method. If I don’t bother getting something out of that closet and into the bedroom closet, I often forget I own it, don’t miss it a bit. And then there it goes–right into the Bye Bye bag 🙂
Hi Meg,
what you do sounds like a tip I just read over at Life Hacker. My husbands work clothes are taking up every spare space in our house already. It sounds like I haven't applied much effort to decluttering clothes yet but that isn't the case. He has a job that requires varied clothing depending on what situation he is in so we are stuck with then until he retires. Now there's another good reason to retire soon, I must tell him that.
I thinned out half my closet and then turned all of my hangers backwards. We shall see what gets culled by spring. All of my clothes fit in my closet now so no shifting with the seasons yay!
Hi Annie,
turning the coat hanger backwards was a good tip. I haven’t had to deploy it in my wardrobe though as I am not over supplied with clothes. I have been within a 5kg weight range my entire adult life so things tend to wear out rather than stop fitting or accumulating due to bordom.. Since I wrote this post the only clothes that did get the chop were some black shirts and pants that were too faded to look good at work. When I shop for clothes I have a golden rule, if I don’t love it I don’t buy it. There is less chance of deciding I don’t like it in a months time.