Purge to Splurge: My Yearly Closet Enema

When the housing market crashed and property taxes skyrocketed, we lost our house. Since then my fiance and I went from a roomy three bedroom house to a cramp two bedroom apartment. We loss so much closet space. Most of our closets are still filled with boxes of unpacked stuff. Jay and I must share a closet in the bedroom. I'm glad my mother taught me how to store and rotate my clothes. 

I always use New Year's Day to do my closet and drawer cleaning. Typically it starts to get cold and snowy in January (this winter the elements started early), so this day is a great day to put away the summer and fall items. 

 I start with my piles on the floor; giveaway, trash, and dry cleaners. This year is a year of honesty. I'm such a pack rat. I have clothes from back when I was a size 14. I keep it around because I'm going to lose the weight and wear it this year....HA! I'm proud of myself because I let a lot of things go. 

It took all day but I'm happy with the results. I got all my summer and lightweight fall pieces put away and went through my winter stuff and tried on EVERYTHING to make sure what I kept from the last season still wore well. I even color coded my half of the closet. We will see how long this last. I'm going to make a conscious effort to keep it organized and cleaned.

There is NO room for error. So I keep rotate my shoes and other accessories too. I keep them in bins. The other bins for out of season pieces I keep in the other closets throughout the apartment.

When you clean out your closets and drawers, you always find pieces you forgot about. These two are no exceptions. 

A genuine leather winter white bolero from Ashley Stewart. I bought this when I worked for them many moons ago. Loved it then....love it now!

A kimono I bought off Ebay from China. I was going to a party and I wanted to wear a kimono. I bought this one and at the time it was too big. I didn't want to go through the hastle of returning it to China, so I was going to get it altered. A few pounds later, it's wearable with the right accessories and minor alterations to make it form fitting. Will make this work!

Janelle