To throw, sell, charity, keep.

See the full sized image by Mycelin★@Flickr here.

That is so 2004.
I’ve just moved back from university to my home for the summer. Somehow, my clothes that I left here seem to have mated and produced ugly children, while the clothes that I brought home from uni must have never actually been part of my wardrobe here. I just have too many clothes. I know, I thought it was impossible too. I decided to sit down and work it all out.

Inventory.
Firstly, I sat down on my bed and made a bit of a mental note about the clothes I had and the actual storage space I had. Actual storage space is somewhere which is designed for clothes – if you have to start using your bookcase as an accessory stand then you have too many. After a careful survey, I found I had two spacious wardrobes with two storage shelves, a chest of drawers with six drawers and a small chest of drawers with two separate drawers. Clothes wise, I had two wardrobes, five of the large drawers, the small chest of drawers and two large-ish holdalls of clothes. There was only one thing for it. Stuff had to go – and in a big way. I estimated that I needed to get rid of at least one wardrobe full of clothes.

You have to make a decision.
Now came the part that was definitely going to cause the most problems – what to keep, sell, give to charity and throw away. I had a set criteria for each category:

• Keep – things that I currently wear, things which were expensive and/or special gifts (just in case!) and things which I might not wear anymore but bring back good memories
• Sell – things which are fairly current in style, things which are brand new but I don’t like anymore
• Charity – things which may not be in style, might not be brand new but are in excellent condition
• Throw away – manky things, ripped, torn, holes, etc.

The things to throw away were definitely the easiest – anything I had left behind while at uni and didn’t fit into the keep, sell or charity categories went straight into a big black bag. There was an unhealthy number of scuffed up jeans going into the big black bags, along with some rather unsightly knitted items which will never see the light of day again.

Beginning of the real work.
My real work is about to begin though. I have about 30 or 40 pieces of clothing which I’m planning on selling. That’s 30 or 40 pictures, plus 30 or 40 descriptions, plus 30 or 40 packages… I think you get the point. But believe it or not, I have a system for that too, which I’ll post about later.

The point?
The real point though that I’m trying to make is you should only have clothes that you actually wear or like, and you should only have them stored in places where clothes are meant to be stored.