No New Clothes Challenge: Purging the Extras

This morning, I dropped a bag of old clothes into a clothes recycling bin on my route to school.  It felt amazing to donate some items taking up precious space in our bedroom.  I’m sure you know the feeling.  Clothes seem to come into our homes in new bags – which feels good.  They also tend to leave – which feels even better.  As many of you know, we’ve been discovering something else about clothes lately…

Yes – our No New Clothes Challenge continues into the new year!

clothes recycling bins

In May, we decided to pull the plug on all clothes purchases.  We felt like we were constantly coming home with clothes that we didn’t need – which was such a waste of resources, space in our home, and money in our wallets.  ”No More Clothes!” we decided.  The challenge was only supposed to go through the summer.  Yet something happened along the way. (You can read our progress posts here at the beginning, here after 3 months, and here once we were in Europe again)

Today we’re still not buying new clothes.  Well there are the occasional purchases of winter boots, gloves, socks.  These are planned purchases.  And now I find myself thinking, “Well do I really need warmer socks?  I already have ankle socks.”

Changing your thinking from shopping when you want more clothes to when you need more clothes is a radical thing.

Now we’re pulling out the clothes that we don’t ever wear and getting rid of them.  Other things are being worn more.  I’m learning how to mend.  (Here’s a how-to on darning socks.)  In short:  we’re using the stuff we have and ditching the stuff we don’t need.

Before we started the No New Clothes Challenge, I used to frequently walk into the bedroom and tell myself, “Okay.  Go pull out five pieces of clothing that I don’t need.”  If you feel like you have too many clothes, try this.  I love the strategy because you’re not looking at items one at a time, deciding if you want to keep them.  You’re walking into the closet with a plan to purge a little.  It’s so much easier to say, “What can I get rid of?” than “What should I keep?” when you set a goal.

So I’ve got a little challenge for all of you.  Go pull out five pieces of clothing.  Donate them.  Cut them into rags.  Toss them.  Whatever it is you need to do.  Try it this weekend.

Then repeat often.

Do you have any tips for continually purging old clothes?  Or how have you been doing with your own clothes shopping lately?

(Image by Katie of a clothes recycling bin in Denver, Colorado just days before starting our challenge)