In this Clothing Organization series, I’m going to walk through all the decluttering I did to downsize from a large walk-in closet to a 51″x24″ closet. This post is specifically about the overflow that filled the walk-in closet as well as a bit of back story for my pre-move starting point.
I purchased my 1950’s home in 2019. The main level is 800 sqft and I moved from a one-bedroom apartment of 960 sqft with an attached garage and laundry room. All of my new spaces were smaller even though the finished areas of the house were about 1400 sqft.
After using Konmari for the first declutter while I was still in the apartment, I still needed lots of overflow storage. I had items in the basement walk-in closet, under the bed drawers, and had to add a dresser that I hadn’t needed in 15 years to store the clothes that I had after the first declutter.
2018 Konmari Clothing declutter:
Marie Kondo came out with her show that year and I knew I was moving so it was the perfect time to go through my clothing. What I found, shocked me. She has you go through tops and bottoms separately so you can see in the image that I had an entire queen-sized bed mounded full of TOPS! This included coats but was still ridiculous. I donated 40 t-shirts from this declutter.
I can’t seem to locate a bottoms photo but I must have had 10 tops for every pair of pants. All of this had fit fairly well into my 7’x4′ walk-in closet along with a lot of extras that didn’t have a home. I also had a coat closet so some of these items were stored in that coat closet but not many.
The Konmari method was successful at helping me see how insane this amount is. Most of the t-shirts I was hanging onto in the idea that I’d make a t-shirt quilt. I had t-shirts from High School and University, but ultimately my mother is right. T-shirts don’t make a comfortable quilt. I also don’t need two quilts like this, it wasn’t going to make it any easier to move with. The t-shirts were also all different kinds of colors and themes.
I was also holding onto tons of items that I didn’t fit or didn’t know how to wear but LOVED. Most made it through this sort as Marie Kondo is as much about beauty as function. Some people are very critical of that approach but there is a point. Ideally, I would have had more clothing that I loved how they looked and fit and functioned in my wardrobe but I was living off of free shirts and clothing that no longer worked for my workplace.
I had started the Konmari decluttering about 2 months before I moved. It seems like that should be plenty of time but it really wasn’t for where I was starting. I only made it through clothing, books, a paper sort, and into Kitchen (Komono). I followed her order but started with Kitchen in the miscellaneous category because the kitchen I was moving to had 2 uppers and one lower cabinet and a bank of drawers, all of which I was going to remodel into less storage.
Clothing storage locations when I moved in:
Initially, the bed with drawers hadn’t come and I later had my parents bring my childhood dresser, so to start I had the closet and the basement walk-in closet full of clothing and extra bed linens.
Sorting Clothing:
The first sort was really separating out clothing I needed on a day-to-day basis. Then I moved the things that were dressy, in the wrong season, or I didn’t know if they fit, out of the closet. The dresser still had a mix.
It was winter when I moved in, so my sweater box was free to start an off-size/off-season box. I moved all my “sentimental t-shirts” that I didn’t wear into tubs under the bed.
I really didn’t get rid of much this first round. I donated some very worn-out clothing and a pair of shoes that hurt. Then a sweater with a hole and shoes that were melted. I moved the fall sweaters and extra t-shirts downstairs as well as additional items I didn’t wear regularly and all my dressy clothes.
Below is what the closet looked like with the items I wore more regularly only:
Hanging hats:
To make room in my off-season/off-size bin I added hangers to the unused space above the rod. I had tried to use the nails already in the closet originally, but hats would fall off as I put clothes away.
Making Room in the drawers:
In order to get out of the basement closet, I needed to make space in the main room. I first looked at all the t-shirts I had still kept that filled two shirt boxes. They were sentimental but not so much as a t-shirt, just as a memory of an event. I picked the ones that I hadn’t been able to wear or didn’t like wearing for one reason or another and photographed their front and back as smooth as I could, then donated them.
Any that I had loved wearing, I moved into my sentimental bin. It was about 3-4 t-shirts.
The other approach I took was to remove dress pants that were 2 sizes off from what I was wearing. I kept a winter pair and a summer pair one size off and my size but moved the 1 size off into my off-size/off-season bin.
I kept to one large container store sweater box as my goal limit but I didn’t make myself get to that in one declutter. It’s a learned skill and winter clothes can fit less than summer clothes, but I find I need fewer severe winter clothes than extreme summer clothes so it works out well. I simply would make decisions about the bin each time I was decluttering an area or switching seasons. So in this case, I was removing items from drawers to pull items up from the basement, so the drawer items had to move into the off-size/off-season bin or be donated.
This approach works primarily because I know the closet is where the most important, “What I wear now” items were (including the off-season bin), so everything that was in the drawers or the basement would have to be donated or be assimilated into the closet.
Exception:
There is one exception to the rule. My work requires us to wear a uniform and they are horribly slow at ordering new sizes. Since starting there I have both gained and lost weight and now have 3 different sizes – 5 pairs of pants for each, as well as two different-sized shirts. I did return the smaller-sized shirt as it goes over another shirt and I’ve stayed at the larger size since starting. However, I don’t even use 5 pairs regularly so I kept two upstairs of shirts and pants in the current size and moved all others downstairs.
I despise these uniforms as the material is not only uncomfortable but has no stretch so there are more clothing items I’m having to hold in my closet because each size is really uncomfortable in transition. I’m working to stabilize my size now but even if my weight stays to same my body composition makes it hard to stay the same pant size. I wear up to three different sizes at the same time depending on the fit of the item and I change regularly so I’m getting used to the idea that my clothing will forever be flowing through.
Next:
The second part of the series is emptying the drawers from under the bed…I know…again, but this time I didn’t pull anything up into them. They’ve remained empty – though sometimes with bedding.