Category Archives: Personal

How to Switch Out Your Seasonal Wardrobe

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

Last month I alluded to my intended goal of switching out my summer clothes for my fall and winter clothes. Oh, the optimism in that post! I thought it would be easy and quick. But I forgot that I kept too many clothes last spring.

You see, I’ve tried to stick to keeping everything that’s out of season in two big plastic boxes. When I can’t fit everything in them, I have to get rid of a few things until I can. But apparently last spring I fell off the wagon and added a third box, made of cardboard and somewhat smaller, but a third box nonetheless.

I was not happy to discover this, and determined to stop this new habit in its tracks. As you know, I live in a small house. I can’t let my clothes clutter, or any other clutter for that matter, get out of control. So as the great Barney Fife would say, I have to “nip it in the bud!”

Here are the steps I used to get my wardrobe back under control:

  1. I pulled all the clean summer clothes out of my drawers and closet, making piles of like items, and leaving empty drawers. (Note that for the last few weeks, I’ve been washing all those summer items in preparation for packing them away, so the drawers were quite full.)
  2. I looked at each item and set aside those that I hardly wore or didn’t wear at all since spring (they’re usually found in the bottom of each drawer, where they eventually landed after I kept rejecting them.)
  3. Clearly they aren’t my favorites, so I made myself put some of them in the donation pile. (That’s hard for me to do because they’re still in good shape and I was raised to be very frugal.) I kept a few others in hopes that I will wear them next summer.
  4. I pulled the two large plastic boxes of fall and winter clothes out of my closet. This is when I was dismayed to find that third box, tucked behind them.
  5. I pulled out each item and assigned it to a pile: the pile of tops and sweaters I expect to wear this winter, the pile of slacks I expect to wear this winter, and a small pile of warm nightgowns and pajamas.
  6. There were still quite a few pieces of clothing left over. Some are either too small or too big but I like them, and will wear them when they fit, so I kept them. But I eliminated three pairs of slacks from the 90s (the brown, green and navy versions of the same style) that are very well made but quite wide in the thighs and legs, which was the style back then. I wore them once or twice last winter and they fit, but I felt silly in them. I think it’s time I finally move them along. I also gave up several tops that I just don’t wear anymore.
  7. I set aside four items that no longer fit. They’re going into my sewing pile. Two are too large and I’m going to try to make them smaller. The other two are 90s full skirts that are tight in the waist, and too full and long; I’m thinking I could use their floral rayon fabric to make summer tops.

Then I put all of my summer clothes piles in the two boxes, and they fit perfectly. So now I don’t have to think about that until next spring. Given how long winter lasts here in the Midwest, spring is a long ways off!

Clutter Makes Me Hate This Chore Even More Than I Already Do

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged ,

Do you have a least-favorite chore?

I like to cook, don’t mind doing laundry, and will even vacuum if I have to. But wow, do I ever hate dusting.

Why do I hate dusting? Well, it’s boring, and once I do it, the furniture only looks nice for a day or two and then dust starts collecting again.

Not that I don’t appreciate a freshly dusted and polished surface, because I do. I just don’t like getting it to that point and having it last only a brief time.

So I often procrastinate about dusting, and that’s bad enough, but I daily procrastinate about dusting when the surfaces around my home have collected clutter.

Perhaps one of us recently celebrated a birthday, so there are cards on the bookshelves, each one requiring that I move it before I can dust each shelf. Bleah! ( as Snoopy would say.)

Or maybe someone has been really busy lately and has allowed extra reading material to build up all over the end table next to her favorite chair (can’t imagine who that would be!) I figure, since the table is covered with stuff, the dust can’t get under it anyways, so why bother? But once the frustration of not having a place to set a coffee cup kicks in, dusting (after decluttering) the end table goes back on the to-do list.

You see, the decluttering part is what really drags out the whole process. When I make the effort to keep surfaces clear, I sometimes get an urge to quickly swipe a dust cloth over a surface. But when the surface is cluttered, the only urge I get is to pretend I don’t notice what a mess it has become.

Whittling Down the Wardrobe

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , ,

Some areas of clutter are easier to conquer than others. For me, keeping my wardrobe under control is a challenge, so I tend to put off doing so until my closet becomes too crowded. It has now reached that level, so it’s time to go through my clothes again.

This gets complicated. We have very definite changes of season where I live, so there are summer clothes and winter clothes to be gone through as well several seasonally transitional items.

To make matters worse, like many women I have three sizes of clothes in my possession: tight clothes, clothes that fit fine and larger clothes for when I overdo it.

I’ve learned over time that the best way to start getting rid of clothes is to first find and pull all of those that have seen better days. I have tops that I love but that are looking pretty worn, to the point that I don’t wear them when I leave the house. There’s no reason to keep them all except that I’m sentimentally attached to them, and if you’ve read my latest book, you know that is not a good reason to keep things. So out they go!

I’ve also learned to keep the highest quality clothes that I like, as well as those I love. It’s been a while since I’ve seen well-made clothes out of good material in stores, so I will hang onto anything I like that is good quality because it will keep its shape and last longer than most other clothes I own.

Sometimes I have to pretend I’m someone else when I’m assessing the condition of each item; this helps me bypass my innate sentimentality in favor of the part of me that adores well-made things.

I make a yearly effort to go through all of my clothes because I live in a small house with small closets and limited storage space. My reward will be that great feeling I’ll get when I go through my closet and drawers to find that everything is neatly arranged and nothing is squashed in. Know what I mean?

Female Susceptibility to Clutter

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Personal Tagged , ,

For me, this time of year always brings back fond memories of going to (or back to) college. That first year, I think I brought everything but the kitchen sink with me: clothes, books, plants, sewing machine, stereo with large speakers, bedding…you name it. Then once I got settled in, I bought more items to personalize my half of one small and very overcrowded dorm room.

After a few semesters, I became part of the crew that helped students move in every August, and I learned what the rest of the crew already knew: the girls brought far more stuff than the guys. Most of the guys didn’t even need help getting their belongings into the elevator and up to their room. But the girls….a few arrived in two cars because one car could not hold all of their belongings. I was fortunate that my father owned a large van, so I brought everything I wanted with room to spare.

I’m old enough (and have raised enough children) to know that no matter what society says, women and men are wired differently. My girls always liked their bedrooms well-decorated in their taste so they’d be comfortable. Meanwhile, my boys were comfortable as long as there was a bed to flop on.

Women tend to put more importance on feathering their nests than men do, and this brings with it the danger of having too many things and being unable to find places for it all. This was true of me for most of my life. Even after what we went through during our downsizing, I still have to police myself to make sure I don’t start keeping too much again. I’ve been learning how wonderful simplicity can be, and how nice something lovely looks when it’s not crowded by lots of other things that aren’t nearly as lovely.

So instead of covering every inch of available wall space with posters and mementos as I did in my first dorm room, I now have a large beautiful quilt and two small framed items on the wall of my sewing room. Photos of potential future projects are found in my files and on my Pinterest page instead of being crowded onto a bulletin board on another wall.

I suspect the female propensity for feathering the nest explains why most “decluttering experts” are women. We understand that need we have for creating a comfortable and inviting environment, and how easily it can get out of control, and why.