Spring is just around the corner with the promise of warmer weather approaching, which means that now is the perfect time to give your wardrobe a spring clean. Having spent the winter accumulating bulky clothes as well as extra blankets and duvet’s for your bed, it is likely that any spare space in your bedroom is filling up rapidly alongside your wardrobe, leaving no room for all your gorgeous spring and summer items.
The problem is that organising and storing all those winter woollies is often a traumatic job that we look for excuses to avoid… until the wardrobe gives way under all the strain, as happened to me last year.
Having spent months stuffing ‘just one more top’ into my poor wardrobe, it decided it had had enough of me and collapsed in a sorry heap of jumbled up clothes, shoes and bags onto the floor. The sorry mess did provide a silver lining however, as sorting out my clothes became a job which could no longer be avoided.
Here’s How I Went About It
1. The first thing to do is empty your wardrobe contents onto the bed and sort into piles – things to keep, things to throw away, items to sell or donate to local charities, and finally, a ‘maybe’ pile.
2. Anything stained or worn needs to go straight away. Try clothes on and anything that doesn’t fit you any longer should also go, eventually you should end up with a ‘keep’ and ‘maybe’ pile. Check through both piles a few times and you should end up with just a ‘keep’ pile.
3. Anything in the ‘keep’ pile that isn’t suitable for this time of year can be packed away. Utilise the space in your home – bulky winter clothing and bed linen can be placed into underbed storage chests, or vacuum sealed storage bags which can be put in the loft. My wedding dress was taking up wardrobe space, but this was rectified by placing it in a protective cover to keep it in good condition and again, storing it safely in the loft.
Wardrobe Essentials
Having decided what to keep and stored all of your autumn/winter clothes away, it is time to start putting your clothes back into your wardrobe. There are many ways in which to organise your wardrobe, I chose to sort mine by garment type and colour, simply because I am always looking for my ‘knee length white skirt’ or ‘high neck pink going-out top’.
This is where it really pays to ensure your wardrobe staples are in good condition. Using good quality wooden hangers and shoe racks for example, will not only help organise your wardrobe more effectively, but they will keep your clothes in good condition for longer.
Top Tips
- Hang all you dresses at one end of the wardrobe as this allows you to utilise the floorspace in the rest of the wardrobe with shoe racks/ boxes containing bags, etc…
- Ensure you include moth-repellent cedar to prevent moths from laying eggs in any clothing being stored for the season.
- Place rolled up magazines in boots to keep them in shape and ensure nothing sits on them which might crush them.
- Ensure any clothes returning from the dry cleaners are taken out of the plastic when they return home. The chemicals in dry cleaning can turn clothes yellow if they are left in the plastic too long. If you want to cover your clothes use a fabric garment bag.
Remember – the point of giving your wardrobe a spring clean (as well as to ensure it doesn’t topple down in sorry mess), is so that you know exactly what you have got and can find items easily. If it looks a little bare after sorting, then an added bonus is that you can go shopping for more items to re-fill it with!
or any of these cards.
Yesterday we published news about our new lavender additions to Hangerworld’s product line. In another coup for the benefits of lavender, it was reported in late December/ early January 2013 that Kate Middleton had taken to eating lavender shortbread in an attempt to battle her hyperemesis gravadarum.
