Too Many Clothes, Too Little Space (long)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I live in a 2-bedroom apartment with two closets: one of them a walk-in.

It’s just me and Susie the cat, but even after using the utility alcove which houses my washer and dryer and has a clothes rack suspended over them, I find I am running out of room!

I am going through my third inventory check in 6 months, and it doesn’t look good. There are just too many shirts, t-shirts, sweaters that have sentimental value to give or throw away, and at 54, if you tell me to pack 'em up and store 'em, you’re going to hurt me to the bone, because I’m likely to tell you that if I don’t see them, I’ll forget about them.

We’re talking one of a kind Hawaaian shirts, German Fussball jerseys, countless numbers of concert t-shirts, beautiful sweaters jeans in every waist size from 30 on up, my old fencing uniform and my flight suit from the Air Force days! Not to mention a couple of trench coats, jackets and suits. Some of those clothes will never go out of style, as far as I’m concerned.

Okay, I admit it: Some of that stuff has gotten too small for me to wear right now, but I know it’s just a matter of maybe a year or so and I’ll be able to fit into it again! :smiley:

Then again, there’s that devil whispering in my ear, “Yeah, but isn’t it nice to know that if you stay blimp-sized, that you’ll have those clothes and won’t have to buy more?”

“Poor little rich boy” syndrome? Nope. I can remember as little as 5 years ago, when I had to wash almost every day and when I only had 2 pairs of jeans to my name. Maybe that’s it: I remember when I had very little, and so I want to hang on to those clothes and the ones I bought after, so they don’t “disappear”.

As I post this, I am in my second bedroom (my mini-music studio/computer room), and I can see one of my “ugly” Hawaaian shirts hanging in my open closet. It’s black with huge orange and red orchids, and it’s my favorite. No way is it leaving this house!

See my dilemma? :smiley: Okay, just needed to vent, no answers needed. Back to culling the inventory…

“Old soft cotton gym shorts, got a few holes in the butt. Toss 'em?”

“No! Yeah they may be a bit holy, but they’re okay to wear here in the house, and where are ya gonna find soft cotton gym shorts cut at a 4 inch inseam??”

“Batman T-Shirt…”

“What, are you crazy? That thing is in pristine condition! Yeah, I know I can’t wear it right now, but I will! Besides, that’s the “Dark Knight” edition! It’s a collector’s item!”

“Straight Dope T-shirt…”

“I will wear that thing till it rots off my back!”

:smiley:
Q

2

Sadly, Quasi, I can sympathize all to well.

3

waves hand in air

ME TOO!

hell I have had a couple of these sweatshirts longer thanI have had my hubby… and frankly feel more pain over their aging!:eek:

My next house will all closets and bookshelves

:smiley:

4

Quasi, you sound like me.

I’ve got T-Shirts for concerts I went to when I was 14, that I haven’t fit in since I was 15. I’ve got the uniform shirt I wore the last day of 6th grade, signed by people I barely remember. I’ve got the sportcoat I wore when I “graduated” from 8th grade, and that thing ain’t EVER fittin’ again. I’ve got an old jacket borrowed from a babysitter in third grade that never got returned. I’ve got a Hawaiian shirt that’s ugly as hell that I wore to one pep rally in 10th grade. And this is all the crap I left in my closet in New Orleans, before I moved to California/Atlanta! This is my second string crap!

I don’t throw things out til they disintegrate on me and even then, I start the “Well, if I only wear it around the house in the dark, it’ll be fine!”

See, in my Ideal World, as my main shirts/whatever began to wear out, I’d replace them with new ones and relegate the old ones to Around the House duty. But here’s what REALLY happens. I buy new shirts/whatever, since I notice my old ones are kinda faded/raggedy. I wear new shirts/whatever once or twice. I bitch cause they don’t fit right (like my old ones, which fit right because I wear em all the time), toss em in with the rest of my “other” clothes, and resume wearing my old shirts/whatever.

5

**Yujin/b], I wanna come to your house should you ever have a yard sale! :smiley:

Q

6

Well, shit. There went the “I’m gonna have flawless posts on SDMB in 2004” resolution. Can’t even bold my friends’ names!:smiley:

Quasi

7

Quasi and GMRyujin, if y’all ever need help sorting stuff out, call me and I’ll come over and be the bad guy. I’ve gotten to where I can be pretty ruthless at culling things out!

The first time I had to cull my books, though, now THAT was hard. But there’s only just so much shelf space in a house…

8

Quasi and GMRyujin, if y’all ever need help sorting stuff out, call me and I’ll come over and be the bad guy. I’ve gotten to where I can be pretty ruthless at culling things out!

The first time I had to cull my books, though, now THAT was hard. But there’s only just so much shelf space in a house…

9

Yuge, Ya think we should take this woman at her word? :wink:

I know she’s the cutest thing (and about to be married!) in the Southeast, but can we trust her not to have a yard sale with our stuff?

:smiley:

JK, AG!:wink:

Love

Quasi

10

Oh, books. Let’s not even get started on those…

And I don’t want to get rid of my stuff. I might need it, eventually! One day, there’ll be a call for me to use the t-shirt I got at that Rush concert years ago, and I’d be stuck without it!

11

I was just sitting downstairs in my study, thinking that what my life might need right now is a good fire because I have too much of everything and not enough of what I need. Instead of starting a fire (and I don’t mean in the fireplace!) I came upstairs, logged onto the computer, and–behold! A soul with a similar problem!

Just to narrow it down to clothes (and not books, videos, 8-track tapes, and stacks of unpaid bills) I’ve got clothes in here that I wore in high school! (Not many though. Over the years I have culled some of them out. I only keep what I still wear.*)

I graduated from high school in 1967.

I also have a closet downstairs which is exclusively full of bridesmaid dresses and Halloween. Even the ones (well, one) which isn’t awful is not something I can ever wear again. And yet–I got rid of my own wedding dress (Gunne Sax, too '70s).

I’m probably never gonna wear the Elvira dress again, either. I did pull out the Cat in the Hat hat (from about 1995) for Halloween this year, sewed a white bib onto a black sweatshirt, added a red tie, and painted whiskers on my face, then went off to my kid’s Halloween party at school. So it’s a good thing I saved that one. Gee–what if I’d sold it at a garage sale or something?

*That would be a pleated black wool skirt, kinda on the short side, which I wear about once every two years because it itches and it’s a little tight in the waist. And a plaid wool jacket, which also itches. Eventually I learned not to buy wool.

12

Quasi, can you sew? Because if you can, or if you know someone who can, I may have a possible solution for you.

I too have many, many concert t-shirts and sentimental, but unwearable clothing items. I will never wear most of them again, but I sure as hell don’t plan on getting rid of them. Thus, I have come up with a solution. I am making a quilt. It will be a quilt with rather large patches. I may even have to make a few of them.

I will be cutting out the picture/logo parts of the t-shirts to use as the “patches” and bordering those with strips from sentimental stuff like sweaters and whatnot. That way, I can keep my memorabilia, but in a more practical way. If I make them two-sided quilts, I will be able to use almost all of my “out-worn” tees in two quilts. Much easier to fold up and store.

Who knows? They might even make heirlooms one day. And it’ll be nice to literally wrap myself in memories. :slight_smile:

13

I was going to propose a quilt as well. T-shirt quilts are a very practical way to hold on to your memories while getting something to display or snuggle with. One way is to line the shirtfronts with interfacing to stiffen them up a little and make them easier to work with; then you can produce a straightforward gridded quilt. If you know any quilters or can sew at all yourself, it’s a very easy project.

14

I sympathize, Quasi - not only do I have a whole buncha wonderful old clothes from my high school days, but I still fit into them 22 (22?!?! How the heck did THAT happen?) years later. Given that, I can’t possibly part with them. Some of them are even back in style - I had to go rescue a pile of flare jeans, muscle shirts and black (well, they used to be black) concert t-shirts from my teenager daughter’s bedroom just today.

If you aren’t up to quilting, I have another idea for the t-shirts. You can buy acrylic picture frames at craft stores. They come with cardboard box liner things inside them. Wrap the cool part of the t-shirt around the cardboard box, stuff the extra fabric in back (pinning it if needed) and hang them on your wall. If you ARE up to quilting, I recommend the iron-on kind of interfacing - use lightweight, which is sew-through-able. And if the Hawaiian shirts are the “untailored” kind, you can thread a curtain rod straight through the sleeves and have the world’s coolest curtains in your bedroom.

15

Oh! You can also stuff your shirts with batting, sew up the edges and make nifty pillows out of them.

16

Hmm. Wonder what kinda dreams I’d have if I made a pillow out of my still-smells-like-beer-n-weed White Zombie shirt?

17

Great ideas with the quilting and the pillows and the frames, thanks! I knew how to sew back in my USAF days, but that was basically just hemming my fatigue pants! :smiley:

Q

18

If you can hem, you can put a quilt together. I don’t even know how to use a sewing machine. What I’m doing is making equal square pieces using a measuring tape, measuring the strips to put around each square and sewing them on, then stitching those pieces together. When I’m done, I’ll measure out a piece of cotton batting the same size as the whole thing, then sew that on around the edges and along the previous stitches.

Repeat process with other side, then stitch it on the same way as the batting. I’m probably making more work for myself, but it’s fun to do in front of the tv. :stuck_out_tongue:

19

That’s probably a clue that you should start getting rid of them. If it really is a case of “out of sight, out of mind”, then the sentimental value can’t be that high, can it? Just give the majority of the stuff you can’t wear to goodwill or something and, if what you say is true, you’ll forget all about them.

It’s deciding to get rid of stuff in the first place that’s the hard part.