Making Your Closet A Little More Beautiful

As yet another post in our “Making Life More Beautiful” series, we’re going to tackle one of the areas we’ve had the hardest time keeping beautiful: clothes closets! Here are a few tips we’ve come across that have definitely helped us.

• First, make a list of all the main activities you have to attend during each season. Church, family gatherings, work, around-the-house-work days, outdoor work, travel, conferences, funerals, weddings, parties, running, days at the beach, playing in the snow, etc. Try to figure out how many outfits for each event you’re likely to need. This will help you in sorting, planning, and buying clothes.
• Sort. Take an hour (or two) to go through all your clothes and sort them into piles. If you’re like us, it can be helpful to have a friend along to “give permission” to get rid of something! Have a pile for keeping, mending/altering, and donating/giving away respectively. 
• We’re slowly learning that less really can be more in the clothes department if we’re thoughtful in what we buy and keep. Don’t feel like you have to keep something just because even though it doesn’t fit, has faded terribly, or simply doesn’t look good on you anymore. Sometimes it can be easy to keep those awful looking clothes for “dirty jobs”, but if you wouldn’t want your mailman to see you wearing it, do the world a favor and throw it away. Daughters who have dirty jobs to do, don’t have to wear ugly clothes! If it helps, consider getting rid of those over-worn clothes one more step in making life more beautiful. It’s really freeing to do it. And it’s much better when you don’t wish you could run and hide when an unexpected visitor comes to the door!
• Now that you’ve sorted through and gotten rid of what you don’t want, look at what you’re keeping. Now’s the time to get out that activity list that you made earlier. Can you make outfits for those activities out of what you have? Use a color wheel to see what colors look best together. Lay out or try on outfits and take photos if you like to help you remember your wardrobe plans.
• Need a few pieces? After going through your clothes, purposefully map out what you still need. Have fun picking out your new items!
• With all the clothes out of your closet, it’s the perfect time to clean it!
• When you’re putting your clothes back in your closet, think about how you want to do it. By color? By item? Specific outfits together? By occasion? Whatever you choose to do, remember that it does make it look tidier if things are generally facing the same direction and the hangers are hanging the same way. (Admittedly, it took quite a while to convince a particular but anonymous member of our family of this!)
• Of course, another aspect of keeping a clothes closet beautiful - or as beautiful as a closet can be - is everything else in the closet. Keep shoes tidy by investing in a shoe rack. Use hooks to hang up purses or scarves. Keep shelves neat and clutter free. Basically, principles in our post “7 Simple Ways to Make Life More Beautiful” apply here as well!

Well, there really aren’t any genius-statements for today, but maybe something will help you out as you go about making life a little more beautiful. 

Note: Some of the above ideas crossed our path via a webinar and study course called Reclaiming Beauty, a resource you can check out here.