Sorting Your Clothes: As Easy As 1-2-3

Here are my suggestions for purging your clothes closet:

Make 3 piles:
1. Clothes you don't love anymore or that don't suit your lifestyle
2. Clothes you love and that fit you
3. Clothes that you're not sure about, for whatever reason

When you're done sorting, create your action piles:

Pile 1 - donate or throw out

Pile 2 - organise in your wardrobe or on your shelves according to your personal preferences - by colour, style (smart, casual, etc), or season/ sleeve length, etc.

Pile 3 - move to another place in the house or to a storage container with a "to look at again" date. When you look at this pile again, try everything on. You will be able to look at the clothes unemotionally and decide whether they deserve to take up space in your wardrobe, or whether they need to be donated.

When we moved into our new house two years ago, I tried on ALL my clothes before I packed anything into my cupboards.

I made 3 piles:

1. Stuff I liked and that fit me (in the wardrobe)

2. Stuff I liked and that didn't fit me (in a spare wardrobe – with a deadline which I noted on my calendar)

3. Stuff I didn't like and that didn't fit me (to the church's welfare box)

Well, I tried on all the clothes (about 4 pairs of pants and 3 suits) from the spare wardrobe a few months later and most of them fit! There was also a suit that fit but that I didn't like anymore, which went to the welfare box. The stuff that didn't fit me was also donated.

Do you have a clothes-sorting system that works for you?

Posted September 28, 2007, filed in How I de-cluttered, Clutter Control Products, Organizeit Projects, Clutter Hacks