More on clothes: less really is more

I talked about reducing clothes here. This is more on that subject.

1. My friend Tina said on FaceBook one Saturday a few months ago that she and her family had  folded and put away so much laundry that day that she couldn't believe they had so many clothes in their house. She was tempted to do like a friend of hers had done and make each person in the house choose three outfits and donate the rest.
2. I was always sorting clothes. Sorting more and more until I had separate loads for whites, synthetics, sheets, towels, rags, pants, shirts, and sweaters. It seemed like if every day I did a load or 2, I could catch up, but there were always huge piles of dirty laundry around waiting to be washed. And there were huge piles of clean laundry around waiting to be folded and jammed into too-full drawers. Then my friend Adam, who, along with his family, has very fresh-looking clothes, said he just washes everything together.
3. In the last year, when we travel to see relatives, which is usually why we travel, we bring clothes for 3 days (4 days for the kids, because they are still pretty young, and sometimes need to change during the day) and wash whatever we wear every day, and it works pretty well. 

So I thought about all this, and decided that we would go through all the drawers and closets. Here is what we did:

• Choose about 4 of each thing (sweaters, underpants, T-shirts, etc.) and put them in our drawers. 
• Look at the rest of the stuff. Is it worn out? Outdated? Does it make us feel queasy with guilt because we spent money on it but don't wear it or someone gave it to us and we don't like it? GET RID OF IT! Give it away, donate it, sell it, consign it, throw it away. I don't care. Just get it out of there.
• What's left? Is it just as good as the stuff in the drawers but maybe not our top 3 favorites? Stick it in a bin in the closet for those times when a) the things you have been wearing every 4th day wear out; or b) something like a cold or a vacation disrupts the usual order of things.
• Voila! You can easily see what you have to wear. It is easy to put things away because the drawers aren't jammed full. 
• I do one load of clothes every day, then, if necessary, a load of rags or sheets and towels. I can usually manage to put everything away every day, and, when I don't, we can just pull the clean, folded outfit from 2 days before out of the laundry basket and put it on. It is awesome.

My friend May wrote to me recently, "Having just moved into a compact little space, I feel that completely - I got rid of so many clothes I didn't wear, and now I'm really wearing what I have. My friend Walter talks about the 20%-80% rule of clothes. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time. I like the idea of just slimming down what we have so that we're closer to owning just that 20 (or 25 - need some special things) percent!"