Paring Down a Clothes Collection

This lovely client is a self described clothes-horse. She is in the midst of downsizing her wardrobe to a manageable quantity.

While minimalism will never be her jam, she recognized that the amount she had collected was taking over areas of her house and she was struggling to keep up with putting things back on hangars... so a “floordrobe” situation was developing in her bedroom.

Clothes were also piling up in other rooms of the house like the basement.

For this “phase 1” edit, we went through EVERY piece and decided “keep” or “giveaway.” She had a friend who wanted clothes in a certain size so many items were bagged to pass on to the friend. The rest of the pieces got bagged for Salvation Army.

The “keep” pile was still too large, but she wasn’t quite ready to decide on the maybes so we decided to make a spare room a “staging area” for overflow clothing. She already had some existing IKEA wardrobes installed, so everything could be hung or folded neatly and visibly.

Moving forward, she plans to take note of what she actually reaches for when getting dressed. If pieces stay on the hangar unused, she’ll donate. Since this arrangement is temporary, I used some cardboard bankers boxes turned sideways as makeshift shelves. Once she has made more decisions on paring down, permanent shelves and rods can be moved around to optimize space. (She has some non-clothing items she would like to store in this space eventually, so it didn’t make sense to rework the shelving units quite yet.)

For now the goal was getting every piece arranged neatly so she could actually SEE her options. No more out of sight, out of mind. She had so much good stuff that was hiding away in bags and piles. I’m so excited for her to start enjoying her pieces!