Ruthless Pruning - The Drawers

I'm back to sorting through all of the clothes in my room. I decided, fairly arbitrarily, I should only own the amount of clothes that actually fit in my room. I live in a small house, but I live alone, and I could just have clothes stashed all over the place. In fact, that is what has happened to me. But it doesn't result in a more diverse set of clothes I wear.  I just keep wearing the same things that are in my room and accessible. I totally forget I've got stuff in the guest room closet or down in the basement. So I've got to get it all together, and keep them all in one place, and limit myself to things I will actually wear regularly.

I've just had a new closet built and used that as an opportunity to review, consolidate, and prune all my hanging clothes, which are 99% for work. I got rid of a bunch of stuff, even if it fit, based on whether I would ever wear it. I broke my ruthless rule for dresses - I found several in the depths of my old closet that I would like to wear (next summer) and they all fit nicely in my new hanging space, so they stay for at least the next year.

Now I'm finishing up with stuff I don't hang. One of the results of the closet construction is that I have more and accessible storage at the top of it. I will still have to rotate summer and winter clothes between the convenient drawers and the boxes at the top of the closet.  I'm trying to figure out how to do that more easily in the future. I acquired clear plastic boxes from the container store, of sizes that fit into this new space, and that's where my summer stuff - shorts and tops - is going now.

I found my dresser drawers stuffed with things that aren't clothes. Toiletry and personal care items for travel in zipped nylon packages - multiples of them.These went into plastic boxes under the bed, to be dealt with before my next trip. Old pairs of eyeglasses, which I will rarely reach for when it fits meets my mood. Those went into a plastic box in the new closet, within reach. Band-aids and other, bulkier, first aid items. I put those into a clear box very accessible (and portable) in the new closet and noted what needs to be added to make it more useful. Scarves. I actually own some. I would like to wear them more often, but I do only once a month or less. There are hanging solutions, so I'll see them and thus give them a try. Jewelry. I wear a necklace and a pin pretty much every day, earrings and bracelets rarely. I dedicated a big drawer in the big dresser to the jewelry, with the idea if it was better organized I would wear the right thing more often. Right now its all jumbled together in the boxes in the front of the drawer, not laid out nicely in the little trays in the back as I planned. They migrated over time, and need to be sorted and restored to their individual places. I'm not settled on a plan for keeping that going yet.

How many socks should a girl own? I've got thin dress crew socks for work, other pretty-colored cotton socks for not-work in the summer, white hi-tech gym socks for gym and running, thick wool socks for the winter when not at work, acrylic hiking socks for, well, hiking! Here's part of my problem, not just for socks:  how many different multiple sets of clothes, for my many different roles, should I own?  I usually wear at least three different things a day: work clothes, after-work clothes, and sleep clothes. Plus gym clothes, at least twice a week. On weekends, chore clothes (sub-divided into gardening, cleaning, boating, running at least) and social clothes. I'm washing the sweat shirt I wore when I painted the closet. It's now got paint on it, and I know I'll be painting again, though maybe not for months. So I should keep a set of painting clothes, right?  Where?  Will I remember and be able to find them again when next I paint?  It might be on the boat, not here, so keeping them with my paint cans may not be the brilliant solution I first thought.

This is also tied to how often should I do laundry?  Or more practically, how often will I do laundry?  I still spend most of my evenings and much of my weekends over with the kids and my brother-in-law. I want to  own enough of each type that I'll have something clean to reach for between laundry bouts.

As all my clothes are laid out and organized, some things are obvious. I just discovered I have five pairs of jeans that fit, in varying thicknesses of denim and shades of blue. That's at least three pair too many, as I've got other slacks I wear on weekends that aren't jeans (think hiking / cargo aesthetics - look at Sahalie to see the type). So do I dispose of three pair, or do I find a way to squeeze them into the top of the closet for when the others wear out?  Which might be twenty years from now?  I will not store them not in my room, where they will be forgotten yet again.

All good questions, to be figured out as I go along. At least I've convinced myself I won't need to buy anything for a while.  I'll probably need to stick to the regimen of disposing of something every time I want to buy something new just because I like it, or else this will just get out of control all over again.  Right now, I've got a box in the guest room where I'm putting all the stuff to donate. I might want to keep a box in there after I get rid of this tranch, so I can keep pruning as I go.

It feels self-indulgent, to think so much about my clothes and how they make me look. This was not something my family encouraged when I was growing up, and the high school vibe was all natural, baby, no fashion or artifice. But this organizing also appeals to the engineer in me - lets get this figured out, laid out, organized and efficient!