Tips for Decluttering Your Clothes

Last Updated on August 2, 2017 by lydiaf1963

One of my personal goals for the decluttering challenge was to tackle my clothes. We have limited storage space in our apartment. Outside of the kitchen there are two closets, two dressers, and some room under the bed. Every inch has to have a purpose.

If you have a lot of clothes to go through I recommend dividing them up into some sort of logical units and working on each one as a separate session until you’re finished. You can do it in one day or over several, whatever works best for you. I had three sessions: closet with current clothes, stored out of season clothes and stuff in drawers.

My system is to first cull out the clothes I definitely don’t want any more. Then try on the questionable items and make a decision about them. The keepers are immediately put away and the others are bagged up to take to the donation center.

As I go through the clothes I ask myself a few questions:

• Do I still like it?
• Does it still fit and look good on me?
• Can I wear it with at least two other items? Since I tend to wear the same clothes over and over, I want to ensure I have pieces that work together.
• When was the last time I wore it and how likely am I to wear it in the future?
• Finally, Is it worth ironing? (We don’t have a dryer and just about everything needs to be ironed.)

The answers were obvious for the winter clothes, less so for the summer clothes. I cut the summer clothes some slack knowing I can always purge them later on.

My shoes are another story. There are shoes stores all over the place but I have difficulty finding my size. I decided it’s not worth trying to repair my favorite black boots anymore and I need to replace my dressy summer sandals. I threw them away when the strap broke for the third time.

The dressers were the most fun. We have two from IKEA (the Rast 3 drawer, nothing fancy) that Rick stacked on top of each other. I use half the drawers for clothes and the other half for odds and ends, which I’ll deal with when I get to organizing the craft stuff.

After making sure all of my socks had a mate, I folded them into little origami packages (see the video below). I rolled my underwear into cigar shapes and stood them upright. There are dividers within the drawers to help keep everything from falling over. I made the dividers by cutting down a heavy cardboard box to fit my drawers and then covering the pieces with some contact paper. You can also purchase dividers like these (affiliate link) but my method utilized a found box and a partial roll of contact paper I already had on hand.

The final drawer holds my workout clothes. Now that I’ve made the dividers I want to buy another roll of paper to cover the bottoms of the drawers.

Here’s the method I use to fold the socks: