During a recent master bedroom organizing session, the client mentioned a problem that I hear from most clients – clothes pile up on chairs, benches, tops of dressers, etc. Because I am always trying to understand the reasons behind my client’s clutter, I asked why she thought the clothes were accumulating. Were they clean clothes she hasn’t yet put away? Some. Were they clothes she tried on but never took the time to hang back up when she decided not to wear them? A few. But most of them were what we jokingly called “clirty”. These were clothes that were worn for a brief amount of time. They weren’t totally dirty, but they weren’t exactly clean either. They were clirty.
(BTW…I thought we were geniuses coming up with this great term. Turns out that it is in the urban dictionary, so others thought of it before us. Darn!)
So why do these clothes pile up? It is really because people are afraid to put them away in the closet or back in the drawer because they may lose track of which ones were worn already. Makes sense! The problem with this solution is the heaps of clirty clothes cluttering up your bedroom.
A simple solution is to designate a home for these clirty clothes. Here are some ideas and the pros and cons of each:
Assign a place in your closet to be “clirty”.
Use a different color hanger to distinguish between the clirty and clean clothes. In the picture above, the clirty clothes are on black hangers, and the clean clothes are on white hangers. Another option is to put the clirty clothes on a hanger facing the opposite direction as the others. Pro is that they are off the surfaces in your room and all together in a designated spot. The con is that they can get mixed back into your regular clothes if you aren’t careful.
Set up a basket to catch clirty clothes.
The pro is that they have a place to live out of sight. There is also a boundary set up for the clothes. Only so many can fit in the basket forcing you (hopefully) to wear them again sooner rather than later. The con is that they can get wrinkly while waiting to be worn again.
Establish a clirty drawer.
Same principle as the basket, but it is in a drawer instead.
Hang them on a hook.
Hang the clirty clothes on a robe hook or on a set of behind-the-door hooks. The pro is that they will all be together when you need to wear them again. They are also hanging, so they will be less wrinkly and can air out better than in the basket or drawer. The con is that you can only fit so many on the hook. But actually…I think there are so many positives in this con. You don’t want to have too many clirty clothes around.
If you have clirty clothes hanging about your bedroom, try one of these solutions. Leave a comment about how it worked for you. Or if you have another idea, I’d love to hear it!
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