Doc was working over the weekend, so instead of hiking, I decided to plow through and finish sorting all the clothes according to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
SO. MANY. CLOTHES.
Here is a before of the closet. Bless my heart, I thought it was pretty good. I could get everything out! I could see what was in there! But I didn’t really like anything in there. And it was perhaps a little…overwhelming:
So everything came out. And I took everything out of storage and the other closets that also had filled up (ahem) and the all got sorted based on what made me happy. This was the “dresses” category, a particularly deep pile:
And this is what 60 pairs of shoes look like, if you’re wondering. At that point on Sunday I felt like a hoarder. But it was also empowering to finally go through it and see what’s there and decide what needed to move on.
When it was all done, this is what the closet looked like. Fresh! Open! Sorted! Filled with things that I knew fit me and that I wanted to wear!
The dresser drawers all got the KonMari treatment, too–folded and “filed” and arranged in color order:
I know I sound like I’m pushing Scientology–“It will all make sense if you just read the book!”–but Marie Kondo’s advice is really and truly life-changing. I’d been hanging on to dresses I made eight years ago, shoes I wore in college, things I didn’t like or that didn’t fit just because I thought I “should” keep them–because I spent money or time on them or because I might need them again. They were a psychological and literal weight.
As I keep trying to explain to my family (who think I have joined Scientology), this approach isn’t about just getting rid of “x”% of your things or only keeping an arbitrary number of clothes. It’s just about making sure you know what’s in your house and that you like having it in there. Life-changing, I tell you.
I notice that you can see everything in your drawers… my sweaters are stacked about 5 deep, 4 across in my sweater drawer so I have to peek underneath to see what’s in there… how are you folding yours so that you can see them all?? I need to know!
The trick is more in how you put them in the drawer vs. how you fold them. Fold them into a neat rectangle shape that fits your drawer, but then NO STACKING. Pretend the folded rectangles are books on a shelf and put them in that way–with the skinny (fold) side down vs. the flat side. MAGIC!