Samira

About 6 weeks ago I decided to tackle a few small projects, which rapidly turned into a mission to simplify my life. I have been purging. I mean, I have really been purging stuff, and it feels great.

Clothes
My closet (my “proverbial closet”, since I don’t have an actual closet) was by far the easiest area of Operation Declutter. And that’s why it was also the first area I really focused on.

Strategy
Before I started I gave myself one simple guideline: What haven’t I worn in a year?

I’m not talking 3 months, or even 6 months—I’m talking one whole year.
I didn’t want to spend too much time trying to figure out whether I might wear a certain item at some point. If I haven’t worn an article of clothing in the past year, chances are pretty high that I will not wear it ever. Despite the fact that said article is in as good as new condition.

Within 20 minutes I managed to downsize my closet by 50%. I filled up 2 large garbage bags: 1 was trash (stained, beyond repair, too worn out), and 1 was to be donated.

Socks
My sock situation was truly out of hand. I know, how bad can a sock situation be? All I know is that my ratio of single socks to pairs of socks was beyond astronomical. I would do a load of laundry, wash all my dirty socks, and somehow only manage to find 5 pairs of socks. Out of some 30 or 40 socks. How is this possible? I know I’m not alone in this; it seems to be a fairly common problem, so I decided enough was enough.

Strategy
My guideline for the sock project was to throw away all socks that did not have a matching pair. It’s time that I would rather spend elsewhere, and a source of irritation—however minor–that I don’t really find useful to perpetuate ;-)

So, I washed “all” (I’ll come back to this later) my laundry, and put all the socks in a different hamper. After I finished folding my clothes, I allowed myself 15 minutes to tackle the sock pile: anything beyond 15 minutes was likely to end up in a forged union.

After I put away my matching socks, I was rather appalled at the volume of lonely singletons. I hesitated for a brief moment, but prevailed: straight to the trash.

To be continued…