KonMari part 1: Tidying my clothes.

Working with my goal of a clutter free and stylish home in mind, I set to work pulling everything out of my wardrobe and sorted it into three piles; Tops, bottoms and full length items such as dresses and coats.

First thought, I have a lot of clothes. Second thought, I don’t wear most of them! Some of them still had labels on them. Here’s a glimpse of the pile before the sorting got under way.

Marie Kondo recommends picking out a few of your favourite items, things that you absolutely adore. For me these were a turquoise Hobbs wrap dress, a coral Topshop coat and a sparkly fox jumper from George. There was no questioning for me: when I look at these pieces I feel joy.

This was a helpful tip to get me on my way. Looking at the huge piles waiting to be sorted it was hard to know where to start. Now that I had a kind of joy litmus test, it was much much easier to go through each pile and discard, and discard I did!

I had 3 piles by the end of the process; joy, no joy and bin. The no joy items were destined for eBay or a charity shop. The bin items were going to a fabric recycling bin. If I had to guess I would say I kept 25% of my clothes at most and only a few items were beyond use so almost 75% of my clothes sat in my wardrobe taking up room and giving me nothing in return.

Some of the pieces I have chosen to discard are still beautiful in their own right, but when I thought about them a little more they were the pieces I put on and then changed out of minutes later. More examples of buying for the wrong reasons which should be a post in its own right. Why keep something I am not comfortable wearing?

This is all I was left with at the end. I think that’s a statement I need to get over. Maybe this is all I wear regularly from that massive pile of clothes! And to be perfectly honest my most worn item, my jeans, were physically on me at the time! And other basic items like vest tops and cardigans were in the laundry. So my remaining wardrobe is slightly larger than the pile here. Phew.

Next comes the putting away. Marie Kondo advocated horizontal storage in drawers over vertical piles in wardrobe shelves. I must admit to wrecking and entire shelf of clothes trying to yank out something on the bottom of a pile. She has her own special folding method for everything that allows everything so stand up by itself, keeping the rest of the drawer in place when you need to pull something out. I hope it works! I’m certainly not worried about fitting it all back in, in fact I’m not sure I will fill a single drawer.

While I’ve only just started down my road to decluttering the room already looks so much better don’t you think?