Clean Out Your Closet With These 5 Tips

Posted May 16, 2023 by Prairie Wife -

It’s Spring, and for me, that means I have the urge to clean out my closet. I’ve been doing this for years, and I thought it would be helpful to share these five tips to help YOU clean out your closet.

Schedule In The Time

Around here, if I don’t put it on the calendar, it won’t happen! Put your plan to clean the closes on the family calendar and tell everyone around you to stay out of your way…or help. I like to do this project solo, so when the Cowkids were little, I would ask The Cowboy to remove them from the house for a few hours. If you don’t have a helpful partner, trust me when I say that it’s worth the cost of hiring a sitter for a few hours.

Don’t Stop Until You’re Done

While I know some closet cleanouts may take more than a few hours, keeping going until you’re done is essential. Nothing is worse than stopping halfway through this project and ending up with a bigger, more overwhelming mess than what you began with! So whatever it takes, don’t stop until you’re done.

Touch Everything In Your Closet

Don’t just skim over items in your closet, or worse, hope around willy-nilly attacking different areas. Start at one corner, touch everything, and decide if it’s an item to keep, donate, or throw away.

Everything In Its Place

How do you decide if an item will be kept, donated to a local charity, or thrown away? If it’s an item that can’t be used anymore due to stains or wear and tear, throw it away. If you can’t remember when you wore it last, if it no longer brings you joy, if it doesn’t fit, or if you don’t like an item anymore…donate it. If you only wore it once or it still has the tag on it, think of it as a learning experience and try and be more thoughtful with your purchases in the future. Not sure? Try it on. Sometimes that’s all you need to remember why you loved or hated an item. What about that one item that you can’t get rid of for sentimental reasons? It’s okay to keep things for emotional reasons, but make sure you have a set number of items to “keep forever” and stick to that number. NOTE: Use this same tip with shoes and accessories too.

Maintain Good Habits Moving Forward

Now that you have a closet full of items you love (and will REALLY wear) it’s vital to maintain good habits moving forward! From now on, when you bring one new item into your closet, an old item needs to go out. Make it easy by placing a “donate” box in the corner of your closet. Then you can throw the clothes in there right away. And donate them all when the box is full! Rember that feeling you had when you donated clothing you never wore or only wore once? Keep that in mind next time you go shopping. Buying trendy items is fun and definitely okay, but be thoughtful with your spending and make sure you will actually wear what you buy.

In places like Wyoming, where were have to have a lot of seasonal clothing, don’t be tempted to get rid of all your cold-weather clothes when you’re doing a Spring purge. Remember that while you are SO over thick sweaters now that the sun is out, you may want them in a few months. Instead of donating these items, put them into storage and edit them thoughtfully when you’re back in the cold weather months.

If you’re looking for some more tips about home organization, check out this post about one of my favorite dynamic duos from “The Home Edit”.

Categories: Health and Wellness, This and That

Tags: , cleaning out your closet, Closet Organization, closets, clothing, organization, shopping, Spring Cleaning