KonMari My Clothes – Part 2

This is part 2 of my KonMari clothes sorting adventures.  In part 1, I got through my tops and my bottoms… and then I was complaining that Marie Kondo’s method of folding and vertical storage didn’t totally work with my deep dresser drawers… but I found a hybrid solution that is working so far…

Hanging Clothes

Anyway, let’s get through the rest of the process…  After tops and bottoms, the next category of clothing to sort was “hanging clothes”.  For this category, I pretty much only had dresses… I had already been through all my tops and bottoms that I hang up, though maybe I wasn’t supposed to include those in that category?  I don’t know…

I owned a total of 6 dresses.  I decided to keep 5 and toss 1.  The one I’m tossing was a very beautiful bridesmaid dress, you know the kind that you say you will totally wear again… but I never do… and I doubt I will.  I still haven’t decided how I’m going to store my dresses, since the side of the closet that I have for my stuff doesn’t have a long hanging area… I may need to trade sides with my husband… or borrow a small section of his side?  Work in progress…

The back of the door will not be the permanent location of my dresses… but it will do until we re-arrange the whole closet…

Socks

This is an interesting or somewhat troublesome category for me… I have normal socks that I wear most days, and some do double duty as running socks… but then I have a collection of thick wool socks for wearing in my workboots at sites for work, which also sometimes double as slippers if my feet are cold in the house… and then I have my sport socks (soccer socks)… So I have a LOT of socks, but then I have to, for all the special circumstances.  As I mentioned in my clothing decluttering plan, I will go away for work for extended periods of time, and don’t want to run out of clothes and spend lots of time at the laundromat, so I need about 2 weeks worth of worksite clothes… That’s a lot of socks…

Advertisement

KonMari My Clothes – Part 1

Today marks 1 year of blogging for me.  It is the first birthday of all-round better me.  But I did a post just recently celebrating my 100th post, so I figured I didn’t need to do another post of that sort… instead I’m going to attempt to document my first go at doing the KonMari purge…

Last week I posted my plan for going through my clothes… And I should really know better than to expect everything to follow those well laid out plans… I really should…

As you may have guessed, things didn’t exactly go as I had originally thought… I did most of my laundry on Thursday and Friday nights, so when Saturday morning came around, everything was clean and ready to go…  But then we got a call from my husband’s parents saying that they were in town for the day with some other visiting relatives and wanted to drop by for a visit… So I didn’t really get started on the clothes until early afternoon…  Then I got part way through my tops, and my husband started panicking that we hadn’t done any Christmas shopping yet (I’m a really good procrastinator), so we went out and got a few things knocked off the list, but that put my sorting and purging on hold… And with a Christmas party on Saturday night, I didn’t get back to it until mid-morning Sunday…

So first up I’ll show you what I started with.  Full disclosure here: When we moved in to our house over a year ago, we just threw our clothes in to the closet and didn’t give any thought as to how things were organized and how best to store things… At our townhouse, our bedroom had 2 closets, one was sort of a walk-in closet that my husband (then boyfriend) took over when he moved in, and the other was not a full walk-in, but generously sized and well laid out that I kept for myself.  Our new house has only one closet in the master bedroom – we are still learning to share…

 

It used to have sliding doors on it, so that only one side was accessible at a time, but if we both wanted to get dressed at the same it would be a battle of sliding the doors… so my husband took the doors off, and now we have an open closet.  I like it much better, but the side walls make it hard to get in to the back corners of the closet, and I know that we could rearrange it better…

Clothing Declutter – The Plan

As I mentioned last week, I finally got ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo from the library.  I have to admit, that with the craziness of the season, I didn’t manage to read the whole book before it was due back (it is so popular that it is still on the fast reads shelf at the library), but I did read most of it and took notes on what I need to do to start…

So, this weekend I am going to tackle the first category: clothes.

When I starting making up my decluttering goals for the year, I had my closet and dresser (ie my clothes) as my tasks for week #10 & #11.  That would have been in March, right?  Ha ha ha!  Better late than never!

A while before I started my own blog, I had been reading blogs about minimalism and the capsule wardrobe (like into-mind), and I was inspired to start making some drastic cuts… or so I thought… so this starting place that I am at now, is actually after I have already gone through and purged a lot of pieces.

Anyway, I have spent a lot of time reading about capsule wardrobes and seasonal wardrobes, but Marie Kondo is of the mindset that you shouldn’t store seasonal clothes away, but keep all your clothes accessible all the time.  But she is also seems to be of the mindset that you won’t have that many clothes if you only keep those that “spark joy”.  I want to use her process, but I also want to explore the idea of a capsule wardrobe or limited wardrobe.  So I want to only keep what sparks joy, but also keep the number of items down to only what I really need.

First step was to figure out what I needed for my life, and Caroline over at Un-Fancy.com has a handy work sheet that helps you lay out what your lifestyle activities are.  I took some time this morning to go over the worksheet and this is what I came up with:

Some notes about my lifestyle:

My Adventures with KonMari – the beginning

So, if you follow me on Instagram (or look at the side bar on my blog…), you’ll know that I finally got to the top of the waiting list at my library to borrow “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo.

Big Cat is reading up on tidying.

 

I have read so many blog posts and book reviews on the subject, that I wasn’t sure I even needed to read the book, but I made it to the library and picked up my reservation.  I had to see if reading the book really did “change my life”…

Now, to be honest, I actually haven’t finished the book yet… It’s a quick and easy read, but I’m not in the habit of taking time to read these days… and I’ve also had some pretty busy and stressful work deadlines, so when I’m looking to chill out before bed, it’s really “turn brain off” time… Not “get immersed in a new project” time…