Try detoxing your wardrobe and you’ll find the rewards are liberating and utterly worth it. By donating your discarded items to your local Helen & Douglas House shop you could also help local terminally children. Marie Kondo is well known for her tidying method encouraging living with items you truly cherish that spark joy and discarding items you no longer wear or use.
So here are our top tips on how to detox and re-organise your wardrobe and help local terminally ill children at the same time
1. Take everything out
When was the last time you took everything out of your wardrobe? To be able to have a proper clear out, you need to take everything out so you can see your clothes properly to be able to make decisions about what to keep and recycle.
2. Clean the inside of your wardrobe
One of the joys of creating an organised wardrobe is that you can actually cherish and protect your clothes properly. It’s also an opportunity to clean the inside of your wardrobe, ideally using natural cleaning products. It’s also an idea to add in some form of moth protection.
3. Organise your clothes into three piles
We frequently hoard possessions for sentimental value. Whether it’s the dress you wore on your first date with your boyfriend, or an outfit you always associate with a great holiday, many items can end up hanging around in your wardrobe long after you stopped wearing them.
Instead, think of how they could be put to better use. Would your Grandma’s old coat be happier gathering dust in your wardrobe forever, or finding new life after being picked up by a stylish student at one of our charity shops? Remember there’s a joy to be found in giving clothes a whole new life.
Bearing this in mind organise your clothes into four piles:
- Keep it
- Recycle to Helen & Douglas House
- Recycle or throw it away
If you don’t wear the item and it has stains on it, has holes in it or is very well worn or faded, sadly this is not something which can sell in our charity shops. But we may be able to use it in another way so donate this in a separate bag.
4. Free up space in your wardrobe before you put everything back
Once you have sorted out your clothes and are putting them back in the wardrobe, there are ways of freeing up space in your main wardrobe. Often we have so much in our wardrobe we cannot find anything when we want to wear it. There is no reason to keep things you only wear once or twice a year in your wardrobe which takes up space for the everyday things you wear so why not:
Create a holiday box
Realistically, there aren’t many days a year when it’s sunny enough to wear strappy dresses, shorts and sandals, so having them clog up a big part of your wardrobe just doesn’t make sense. Instead, create a holiday box, full of items like bikinis, sun hats and floaty summer dresses which you only wear on holiday.
You’ll feel a real sense of excitement every time you reach up and bring your holiday box down for a trip.
Store occasion wear separately
As with holiday clothes, special occasion clothes can be stored away from your everyday wardrobe after all, an evening dress often takes up a significant amount of room, and probably only gets worn once a year at the most!
Pack special occasion items away carefully using acid-free tissue paper to keep them in perfect condition. Make sure the box is clearly labelled so you know exactly what’s in there, before stowing it away on a high up shelf or above a wardrobe.
Organise your scarves and tops the Marie Kundo way
T-shirts and scarves can take up a lot of room in our wardrobes. If you roll or fold these the Marie Kundo way, this takes up so much less space and can be stored in drawers or boxes rather than in your wardrobe and you can organise them in colours.
5. Put your clothes back in your wardrobe into sections
Separate workwear and leisurewear and then group the items of clothing by type ie skirts together, long-sleeved shirts together etc. You can also do this in colour blocks too.
Finally, make sure you don’t let your wardrobe get out of hand again; you could try:
- A ‘one in one out’ policy
- Start regular monthly pruning to ensure that everything you own truly deserves its place in your clutter-free wardrobe.
- Face all your hangers the same way. When you wear a garment and return it to your wardrobe, turn the hanger so it is facing the opposite direction. So when you do your next wardrobe clear out your know which clothes you have worn and feel great in.
- The big question is how would you feel being able to donate any unwanted preloved items to help local terminally ill children?
Find out where your local Helen & Douglas House shop is where you can donate your preloved items from your wardrobe. Each bag of donations will help local terminally ill children.
Why not sign up to Gift Aid and add 25% to your donation?
Every gift you make to us could be worth more at no extra cost to you. If you are a UK taxpayer and you say ‘Yes’ to Gift Aid, we can claim 25p for every £1 we raise by selling your donations under the Government’s Gift Aid scheme. Ask for more details when you take your donation into one of our shops.