We spent some time this weekend going through our closets for a pre-move purge.
Surprisingly I ended up with a garbage bag full of clothes from my side of the closet. I shouldn’t be too surprised as I bought some smaller, better fitting clothes over the past few months. I lost a bit of weight after going through our Rethinking Fitness which included situps, pushups, and running, followed by one round of P90X, and now the bicycle commuting. In all, I’m back into medium sized shirts and I dropped two pant sizes, down to a 32 waist.
I couldn’t continue wearing my large shirts and two sizes too big pants without looking like a clown or a homeless person. So, I bought a few things here and there. I didn’t immediately purge the old stuff, but I took care of that this weekend. I went through my jeans and t-shirts and pulled out all the large sizes. I also threw in the sweatshirt and fleece that I said I’d be getting rid of in my too many jackets post. To top off the donation pile, I added a wireless keyboard that was sitting in a stack of surplus electronics behind our bedroom door.
Dream did some purging as well. She had a hard time getting started, so I offered to help. I pulled out a stack of clothes from each shelf and placed them on our bed. Having the task broken down into small piles made it less daunting than approaching the closet as a whole. She quickly sorted through some piles.
Other piles required a fashion show as she tried on garments and posed in front of the mirror. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of her too small shorts and pants were no longer too small. She beamed as she tried on all the clothes that were too small before finished our P90X workouts.
She ended up with a bag full of clothing as well.
While we were in our closet, our daughter worked on cleaning up here craft supply drawers. We a plastic six drawer storage thing that hold her crafting supplies. We keep it in our closet because there isn’t really any other good place in our apartment and this keeps it out of site. She ended up with a bag full of trash and a neatly organized set of drawers for her efforts. The trash consisted of old coloring books, stickers, sketches, used up notepads, broken crayons, and dried up markers.
It was a productive couple of hours, and dropped our donations off at Goodwill that afternoon.
Mini Mission: Moves are a great time to purge. Even if you aren’t planning to move any time soon, you can still join us in spirit. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to enter your closet and PURGE.
- Go through it in sections.
- Pull out everything in that section and lay it on your bed.
- Make a keep pile and a purge pile.
- Put the keep stuff back in the closet and continue to the next section.
- Repeat until your closet is neat and your purge pile is large.
Be sure to come back here and let me know how you did.
Related articles
- Moving to a New Apartment (rethinkingthedream.com)
- Quality Over Quantity (rethinkingthedream.com)
- Decluttering in 2013: Join Them (theminimalistmom.com)
- Inch by Inch Decluttering (bemorewithless.com)
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I did this in the pantry last night, closets are further down on the spring cleaning list as they aren’t immediately visible to visitors! It it organized for now, and I have moved up anything with ‘close’ dates so we can use them up before they need to be tossed. Only casualties were some funny smelling soup crackers and a handful of stale pretzels, and all the shelves are wiped down. I do have a stack of things to donate/craigslist on the dining room table, and I hope that pile gets bigger as I continue my spring cleaning!
Hi Jen,
Awesome, thanks for sharing your spring cleaning. We did our pantry a couple of months ago, I guess you could call it a winter cleaning. Moving the ‘close’ dates to the front is a great tip, I’ll keep that in mind when we do our next pantry cleaning.
Great ideas! Thanks for this. Looking forward to more along the same lines.
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