After posting about my cluttered closet, a person I know asked me if I could help her with her own closet, which has been getting out of hand.   

She told me I could post the before/after pictures ONLY if I did not post her name.  hee hee 
So she will be referred to as "Sue" in this post.

Here is what Sue's closet looked like when I first walked in.  The clothes were so closely packed together that it was almost impossible to try to put any more in there. In fact, there were many more clothes in laundry baskets that were needing to be hung, but couldn't because of these clothes that were in the way. 

Sue told me she had a really hard time getting rid of the clothes because she felt she might use them someday, but at the same time, she knew it was getting really hard to even find the clothes she really wanted to wear...so it was time to do something about it.



Here was the bottom row of clothes in Sue's closet..


A close view of the top row:


Here are some miscellaneous items on the floor.  I bought 10 banker boxes to sort things with.



The first thing I did was pull down every single item of clothing from out of Sue's side of the closet.


Then piled them all on the bed:


Then, for about 2 hours, I would pick up one piece of clothing, hold it up, and say, "Do you want this? Have you used it in the last 6 months? Will you ever wear it again? Do you REALLY need this?"... I did this as quickly as possible, giving Sue very little time to think about it and rationalize keeping it.    This worked perfectly!  We got rid of actually about 3/4 of this pile.  That was progress!   4 stuffed full hefty sized bags of clothes were put on Freecycle and gone the next day!

Sue's husband also went through his side of the closet on his own that night.

I came back the next morning, and there were about 3 more hefty sized bags full of Sue's husband's clothes ready to go to Freecycle. 

We put all of Sue's clothes back on hangers (we threw out the wire hangers and only hung the rest on plastic hangers), and placed them back in the closet.    Got rid of about 36 shoes, organized all of the things in the closet with Banker Boxes, and swept and vacuumed the floor.

Here is what Sue's closet looks like now- a LOT of progress! Wow:


The top row of clothes - notice the Banker Boxes on the top...there are 10 of them in all.


And here is more...


Are you inspired yet?