Your closet is full. No. More. Room. And yes, we’re happy to help you organize. But if you’re up for the challenge, you can do it yourself in about an hour. We call it the D.A.S.H. Method. Why? It’s quick and it’s an acronym so you’ll remember it. Hold onto your hat and get ready because you’re in for a ride.
Our very own “Before”. Ack!
Follow these steps:
- Set up four containers. Label them “Donate,” “Alter” “Sell” and “Hangers.” (D.A.S.H., get it?) I like big Rubbermaid tubs but big corrugated boxes. laundry bins or garbage bags work just as well.
- Next, take 10 minutes to identify all of your favorite clothes. Yes, I said favorite. Set a timer and work quickly. As you find your faves, pull them completely out of your closet, keeping them on the hangers. Set them on the bed. What are “favorites,” you ask? Favorites are what you’d wear today, what you wore last week, what you intend to wear tomorrow and what you just love to wear anytime or on special occasions. Note: it’s not clothing you wish you could wear again. It’s okay to have a lot of favorites, you just can’t say all of them are. Twenty-one is a good number to shoot for. Why? It is a perfectly acceptable number of clothing to have (as a nation, we typically wear only 20% of our existing arsenal), plus 21 is easy to remember. Time’s up or reached the magic 21? Good, now stop. Smoosh all of your clothing to the front of your closet to make room in the very back. This is where your favorites will go for the time being. They’ll make their way back to the front again. Trust me.
- Now…working your way backwards (from your favorites to the front of your closet), take ten seconds for each non-favorite item and decide to either donate, alter or sell. Notice one of the choices here is not “Keep.” That was Step 2. We’ve moved on. We’re in Step 3 now. This is your moment to seize, to step up and be brutal. It’s not the time to remember when you bought it or where you wore it or who you were with when you got red sauce on the cuff. This is the time to recognize that THIS PIECE OF CLOTHING IS NO LONGER YOUR FAVORITE. Take it off of the hanger, say goodbye and put it in a Donate, Alter or Sell container. Put the hanger in the Hanger container. Done. The first couple of items you do this with will feel liberating. The key is to stay with it and maintain momentum. Ten seconds for each item will go quickly. In 30 minutes, you can get through 180 articles of clothing this way! SIDE NOTE: We also took the time to remove our least favorite hangers from the bunch (see picture below). These evil little buggers bother us to no end – they’ve got a little tabby thing on the front. The tabby thing is great for ribbons that keep our clothing straight on the hanger, but we also discovered that it just hooks onto the hanger next to it, wreaking all kinds of havoc when trying to pull down one piece of clothing. So we said bye-bye to these suckers in today’s purge.
- Time’s up? Take a look at what you decided to Donate or Sell. If you feel a twinge of regret, choose three items you just can’t live without and put them back in your closet. Yes, you may have three. See, I’m reasonable! (For the record, I had no twinges of regret with the items below.)
- Grab a cool glass of water, relax and admire your handiwork. Your closet is now bursting with only your very favorite articles of clothing. Congratulations! You have our permission to go out and reward yourself with a new favorite. But before you do…
- You’re not quite done. Take those tubs out to your car. You now have thirty minutes to drive the Donate & Hanger bins to a local charity that accepts clothing, take the Sell bin to a consignment shop and the Alter bin to your local tailor. If these places are more than 30 minutes away, please don’t speed to make your deadline. But you get the idea!
- Well done. You have successfully purged your closet in less than an hour. These are our very own before/after photos from today. Feel free to post yours and tell us how it went!
Wake Up Your Home 
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