Not a darn thing....

I recently took part in a clutter challenge. My clothing wardrobe consists of 3 parts, summer, winter, and the core. The core clothes are things that remain year round, jeans, cotton cardigans, sneakers, ect. Winter and summer are just that, clothes that must be stored off season. I have maintained my wardrobe for years using the general rules I have laid out in seven steps in this post. I think this system has served me well for many years and I didn't see any need to change. Using this system, I had reasonable sized wardrobe and plenty to wear. I always had space for my clothes and didn't consider my wardrobe overly large or full of unwearable pieces.

I didn't believe the hype of Marie Kondo and I was challenged to it. I dumped my entire wardrobe into the guest room. Everything from everywhere went on the bed, and then the floor and the shoes spilled out into the hallway. It took half a day just to locate and collect my clothing. I will never show anyone the before pile. It was truly amazing, humbling, and shameful.

This is the first after photo, my summer wardrobe is six hanging garments, one Rubbermaid tote, 5 shoe boxes and one sweater box. A pair of Wellies and a pair of garden clogs are in the garage. (The other sweater box has a few heirlooms in it.) I am truly amazed. I am not 100% convinced yet, and the discards have not left the house....but this was starting to become a very interesting experiment.

So this is the closet with the summer and core wardrobe. There is still plenty of space and nothing is crowded, but I had the winter garments to sort and add. That was not fun. Winter clothes take up a lot of space and I am unwilling to part with some clothing that I consider essential winter survival gear. I still have an arctic winter parka, my LL.Bean Hunter's boots and wool socks. I need them now and again living here, but not every winter and they certainly don't spark any Konmari joy. If I had to be critical of the Marie Kondo's method of clutter removal, there is a category of things that are absolutely essential, but completely joyless, to own. Snow survival gear falls into just that division, so does pantyhose, granny pants, and a spare pair of shoe laces.

The above three photos are the finished project. The closet contains the core wardrobe plus the winter wardrobe. The summer hanging items have been moved to a seasonal family closet which also contains other necessary but infrequently worn items such has our ski wear and heavy winter parkas. This closet will also hold our winter coats during the off season as they are hung in the front hall closet along with our boots and hiking gear. The cedar chest has my wool sweaters, half is empty for my husband's things. The chest of drawers contains underclothes and pajamas. They are in exactly two and a half drawers as this chest is also shared. 

As a result of this challenge, other things happened. .I exchanged two rooms in my home. That is, the sewing room became our bedroom, and the master bedroom of the house is now my sewing room. This is because the closets in our new room function better than the old ones. The room is only two-thirds the size of the original master but everything fits and there is nothing superfluous to the purpose of this room. My husband also cleaned out his clothing.

 I still have reservations about the amount of things I discarded. It was more than seven bags of clothing between the two of us and it represented about 60% of my wardrobe. I have tied those bags up tightly and put them in the guest room like some secret start of a hoard. The change of seasons for clothing is only about 60 days away. If I don't need things to be added back into to the closet, the bags will be discarded at Easter time.

There are two final results of this experiment. The first is that the contents of the sewing room is now heaped on the floor of its new home beckoning me to continue the procedure.  The second result is that purpose of this blog is called into question. I invite comments from my readers as I'm not sure where my sewing hobby is going to be heading in the future as apparently I need not a darn thing.