Closet Culling

We've been meaning to do this for several years.

When we moved into our house, in 2000, we ordered beautiful oak furniture for our bedroom. The drawers were made of cedar, which apparently keeps the moths away (so far, so good). The small, family-owned company that made the furniture, by hand, was located near Montebello, Québec, and I remember how it took two very muscular young men a lot of effort to get the dressers up our stairs and into our bedroom.

In our original layout, we didn't like how one of us had very little room from the edge of the bed to a wall, so after a couple of months, DW and I rearranged the furniture so that we both had lots of room on either side of the bed.

And yeah, that furniture was a bitch to move.

The only problem with the rearrangement was that one of the dressers, which also has a small door that hides shelves, didn't quite fit in one corner, so we had to place it on an angle in order for us not to bump into it.

It's been in that spot for more than 20 years, on an angle, next to our walk-in closet. Over the years, we've stored odds and ends behind that dresser—mostly items that we didn't want our cats to get at, such as DW's yoga mats and our camping mattresses.

This weekend, DW and I finally decided to de-clutter our closet, and DW said that the time had come for that dresser to no longer occupy that corner. She wanted it to go in our closet.

We pulled literally everything out of the closet: shirts, pants, dresses, suits, suitcases, gym bags, the laundry hamper, and more. There were things that we hadn't seen in years. It all went on our bed and wherever we could fit it on the floor in our room.

Next, we vacuumed the carpet and wiped down the shelves. It was so weird seeing the closet completely empty. With the blinds drawn and sunlight flooding in, it seemed huge.

It was time to move the dresser into the closet. Even with all of the drawers pulled out and the shelves emptied, it weighed a ton. But DW and I prevailed and the dresser was at the back of the closet.

Our next job was to go through all of the clothes and items that we had in the closet before, and to start culling. I threw out some dress shirts that I hadn't worn in years. Some, I hadn't worn because my gut had grown over the years and no longer fit me, but to my surprise, they fit me once again.

But I still put them in a donation bag. "If I haven't missed these shirts before now, I'll probably never miss them in the future," I told DW.

I pitched some dress slacks, some that didn't even look as though I had ever worn them. DW found outfits from which she had never even removed the store tags. She found one of her old black-velvet and satin cocktail dresses, that she had worn when we were first dating, and asked Kid 1 if she would be interested in wearing it. Kid 1 liked it, tried it on, and it fit perfectly.

DW also found a cloth bag, with Korean Hangul written on it, which had been tucked away at the very back of the closet, behind other clothes. Inside was a perfectly folded dress. It was a Korean hanbok, or traditional dress, which had been given to her, in 1997, by our friend, Kyung-hee.

DW showed it to Kid 1, who immediately wanted to try it on. She had to look online to find out how to adjust it so that it fit properly, but the dress, although a tiny bit too long, otherwise fit Kid 1 like a glove.

Photos shot, we carefully refolded the dress and placed it back in the bag that had preserved it for 25 years. It's a keeper.

We've filled almost four bags of clothes and shoes for donation and have moved other items into storage in other parts of the house that can better fit them. There are lots of items that are being disposed of, no longer being of any use. And we have more things that will be sorted and dealt with in the coming days.

But our closet is less crammed—we can actually walk into it without tripping over things—and more organized. And it was nice to step a bit into the past.

Happy Monday!