The Big Closet Clean Out of 2012

One of the things that I've realized over the last several months is how much of my time and energy is spent taking care of things. Since I continue to have a fair number of "bad days," where I don't feel like doing much, it seems more imperative than ever that I spend what time and energy I do have taking care of people, and not things.

In my pre-mommy life, I loved clothes. At one time, I had several very large closets full of just my own clothes. When we purchased our little house a few years ago, I had to pare back considerably, to fit what I had in one very modest closet. I still jammed in as much as humanly possible, at times experimenting with a small dresser or a second rack at the bottom of the closet, to hold even more. On the (extremely) rare occasion that all of our clothes were clean, I'd have to pile some somewhere.

The truth is, like most other people, I wore maybe a third of what I had. I'm a stay at home mom. Most days I wear jeans and a t shirt. If I'm honest, most days I rotate through the same half a dozen pairs of jeans and t-shirts.

So I did a major purge, over the course of a couple of months, getting rid of at least half of what I had. I got rid of things that didn't fit, that didn't go with anything, and that for some reason just never seemed "right."

I'm left with, you guessed it, mostly black or tie dyed shirts, and jeans.

I'm sharing this because it's been ridiculously freeing.

The clothes I kept fit, and I like them, which means I'm spending way less time trying to figure out what to wear. Instead of having to dig through 12 pairs of so-so jeans that are too short, or the wrong color, or whatever, I have about half that many, which I love. (Gap 1969 jeans are the best, by the way, especially if you're tall.)

I can now hang all of my clean clothes in the closet at once without a struggle. The clothes don't end up terribly wrinkled from being smashed either. (Not like I was ironing them anyway, but at least I don't have to wear wrinkled clothes all the time anymore.)

I'm maintaining my closet equilibrium by getting rid of something old when I get something new.

Basically, I'm on sort of a long term mission to declutter our whole house like this, even if it takes a year.