Dealing with Clothing Clutter
A couple of days ago I mentioned my own personal Mount Washmore* from back in my days of extreme household clutter. Mount Washmore was an 18-inch to two-foot deep pile of dirty laundry that covered our laundry room floor and spilled into our bedroom and the hall.
It’s not that I hadn’t been doing laundry, mind you. A couple of times a week I would wash three or four loads in a panicked laundry marathon. (Sunday nights were popular because it would dawn on me, “What the heck are we all going to wear tomorrow??!”) But since I was doing laundry under pressure, I would go through the huge heap trying to piece together enough outfits to get us all through a couple of days. I couldn’t just wash everything because there was so much dirty laundry.
What happens when you can’t find missing socks in the chaos (hint: check under the kids’ beds and even between their sheets!)? You guessed it — it seemed like I was always asking Martin to pop into Walmart and pick up yet another six-pack of socks or underwear because there were never enough. When you’ve forgotten several favorite pairs of jeans or dresses at the bottom of a heap of clothes, it’s easy to think that you need to shop for more clothes because you have nothing to wear.
When I decided something had to be done, I started a new routine: washing, drying and putting away two loads of laundry per day, every day. In my large capacity washer, this was about twice as much laundry as our family of five generated on an ongoing basis, so I figured I’d be catching up on the backlog of laundry at the rate of one load a day.
Well, I did two loads of laundry a day almost every single day, and Mount Washmore gradually — very gradually — became smaller and smaller. Believe it or not, it took more than a month to get to “bare floor” status. This means that our family of five had more than 30 loads worth of backlogged dirty laundry!
Decluttering the Clothing
As I sorted and folded the clean laundry every day, I separated each item into one of three piles:
- Keep: the item was in good condition, still fit, and looked nice;
- Throw Away: the item was torn, stained, worn out, etc.;
- Donate: the item was in good condition but no longer fit or, if it did fit, it didn’t suit its owner.
Why didn’t I just trash the junky clothes without washing them? This is where the crazy comes in 
To this day, I find it nearly impossible to throw out an item of clothing that is dirty. What would the garbagemen think??
I have to tell you that it was very challenging also to give some of the clothing away, my clothing in particular. What if I gained weight and needed those bigger clothes? What if I lost weight and could wear the smaller clothes again? Well, the truth of the matter is that most of the clothes that didn’t fit me were also very dated, and if you look at your clothing critically you may find the same thing. This anxiety that I had was compounded by the fact that I had suffered poverty in my teen and young adult years and I worried that I would find myself too broke to buy more clothing in the future when I needed it. Well, that worry proved to be unfounded and I now truly believe that clearing out the clutter opens the door to abundance in our lives.
So I pushed forward through the anxiety and continued to trash and donate all the clothing that was in bad shape, didn’t fit, or that we just didn’t like. Every time a donation bag was filled I put it in my minivan and made a point of dropping it off the next time I went by the clothing donation box. I did not keep count but I know that I must have donated at least 12 huge bags of clothing. It was unbelievable. Even after tossing and donating every item we didn’t love, the whole family had more good, clean clothing than we knew — and so many socks that I did not buy socks again for at least a couple of years!
A nice side effect of dealing with the clothing clutter? My daily habit of doing laundry stuck with me and became my Laundry Routine.
* Thanks to the wonderful FlyLady for this unforgettable expression.
Read all the rest of the posts about daily decluttering here.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jillslivingroom/
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2 Responses to “Dealing with Clothing Clutter”
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These are all good reasons and I can see how cluttered my closet is but my big problem is that I go through it over and over and put things back in that don’t fit because they are good and because I think I will make something out of the clothing such as quilts or rugs or doll clothes or things for my grandson and granddaugher who are young. We do not have a fabric center in my town and I love to sew but never find the time to get my fabrics sorted and cut for what I want to do with them. Should I take these clothes and sort them for my project and get rid of the remnants after I have my pieces cut. HELP!!!! I really don’t want to throw the material and I have so many ideas but don’t seem to get organized to get them done. I have gone from super organized to a MESS.
Hi Betty
It is really hard for us to let go of things that we think have value or that we might use one day. But for many of us, the bottom line is that we just have too much stuff to organize it all into the space we have. There are lots of strategies you can employ — I’m going to make a note to write about strategies for that feeling of not wanting to release the things. Also, peer support for this sort of thing can be really helpful. Thank you so much for your comment!