Day 2 of the Purge

Yesterday the kids attended two birthday parties so the house was quiet.  I used the time to start the purge.  I went through my side of the closet and started pulling out items that do not fit, don't look good on me or I would only wear in a clothing emergency.  What's a clothing emergency??  It's when my favorite clothing is dirty so I must resort to my second tier clothing.. these are clothes I wear if I have to not because I want to.  It's sad that I have several tiers of clothing.  I pulled out 35 pieces of clothing without having to make hard choices.  I decided to see if I could pull out another 35 pieces and I did.  Although the second purge of 35 included 5 pair of shoes.  I did pick more carefully in the second round but all 70 items needed to go and I still have plenty of clothes to wear.  Talk about excess- ugh...

A couple things that struck me:

• It only took me 15-20  minutes to pull out and stack 70 pieces of clothing and shoes.  
• While it was not hard to identify the clothes that needed to go I found myself thinking- I bought that when I was with, or I wore that when I worked full time, or that's the suit I normally wear to such and such.
• I associate clothing with people and memories.  For me holding on to the clothes I no longer wear is like keeping old friends in my closet... except the reality is there are no friends in there- just clothes.

I have decided my clothing will go to the thrift shop in town.  They sell clothing at fantastic prices and all the proceeds get funneled back into our local elementary schools.  

My next stop was Henry's closet.  I knew he had clothing in his closet we could purge.  I was surprised at how much we could purge.  Most of the clothing was clothes that no longer fit him or I knew he would never wear.  This process took me much longer than 20 minutes because I wanted to match up the clothing sets.  The clothing in very good or good shape was being handed down another family.  Everything else is being sent to the thrift store or made into rags.  The count in Henry's closet- 57.  Serious excess!

The current total for day 1 and 2 is  127 items.  WOW!!  Who knew we had so much??  We are half way to our 245 goal and we still have Rob, Merone's and Igor's closets to go through.  Now, it's not about meeting the goal which I thought was set very high (HA!).  It's about removing the excess clothing and shoes.
Interested in how others are doing? check out the blog hop: