Laundry List #2 - Room Change

The purpose of this post is to outline some basics of room change as it pertains to closet organizing, or closet change, if you will.  There will be years when your closet change is lazy or uninspired, late or minimal; but every few seasons you need to take initiative and clean out your closets and wash, pretty much, everything in your wardrobe.  With sweater cleaning you have to adopt assembly-line choreography of washing, rinsing, rolling, flipping, moving and rotating.  With closet change, you have to strike a balance between militant obedience to organization and inspired whimsy, while constantly doing laundry.

While packing up your spring and summer clothes take advantage of the fact that your sartorial decisions of the past few months are fresh in your mind.  Think realistically about what you did and didn’t wear.  Be ruthless and unmerciful with your decisions about which items you donate, if they have no emotional hold on you they should be gone. (Note: If you do have a lot of pieces that carry sentimental value and/or are too incredible to throw out, you can create an archive of these items.  Just be sure you tend to them over the years so they don’t get musty and moth ridden.)

While you are washing and/or dry cleaning your spring and summer pieces in order to prepare them to be stored away, unpack your fall and winter wardrobe. If your sweater cleaning has been dragging on, room change will light a fire under you for sure.  If you had dry cleaned your winter wools and put them in air tight containers with cedar blocks the previous fall, then they won’t be too musty.  But, even if you do all this, they will still be stale and will need a little TLC.  In order to revive them, you can:

-         If your iron has a steam function, flip your pants with linings inside out and steam through them so they are a little damp, hang them to dry. This process will freshen them right up.

-         Hang your wools all around your house with the windows open for a day or so to let them. This is why I like to get started on this project while it is still warm out, you can open the windows and air stuff out while you still can.

-         Dry clean your items; a good rule of thumb is, if an item of clothing has a lining, you should either steam clean it yourself or take it to the dry cleaners. Everything else is pretty much fair game for hand washing.

Whether it is instigated by seasonal change, inspiration from a photograph, the need to make room for a new purchase or basic boredom, closet change and ensuing room changes, are a tricky business; time consuming and surprising, they often inspire a domino effect of orderliness.   The supreme satisfaction, however, that results from having clean and orderly closets and a list of the items you will need to buy to make your fall and winter wardrobes complete makes it worth it as you realize you are one step closer to creating the perfect refuge from the oncoming winter.