I Know It’s In My Closet – Why Can’t I Find It?
At a cooking school in Paris in the late 1970’s, Chef Albert was demonstrating how to make a pear tart. Our mouths were watering when he pulled it out of the oven and sliced it up for tasting. Forks poised, we dug in.
But, on first bite, I noticed something strange. The tart filling seemed to be sucking up all the saliva in my mouth. Not believing my taste buds, I tried a second bite. And spit it back out on the plate. It tasted like The Great Salt Lake.
One of Chef Albert’s assistants had mixed up the salt and sugar containers. The tart had a cup of salt in it and a pinch of sugar!!
A huge sign hung on the kitchen wall saying in French “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
Chef Albert’s demo that morning demonstrated the wisdom of that saying. And the same wisdom can be applied to your closet. For those of us who weren’t born with the organizational gene, that’s seems easier said than done. But, it CAN be done more easily than you might think. You just need a strategy to break down the process into smaller parts.
Start by removing everything from your closet that you don’t use.
That includes clothes and accessories that don’t work for you anymore because they don’t fit or they’re out of style. And if you haven’t worn it in a year or more, you need to ask yourself why? If you haven’t got a good answer, it probably needs to go. Once you’ve done this, the next step won’t seem so daunting because you’ll be feeling a lot lighter with less stuff in your closet.
Now you need to do some fine tuning.
First, hang all like garments together-suits, shirts, blouses, pants, should be separated into their own sections.
Second, arrange each section according to the blue items together, all the reds, all the greens, all the blacks, etc. It’ll be easier to scan the contents of your closet and find what you’re looking for.
Third, get all your shoes on racks or into clear plastic boxes (labels can help here!) You want to be able to find them easily, and you won’t if they’re in a jumble on the closet floor-or worse, in a pile somewhere else in the house.
Fourth, do the same with all your other accessories. There are hangers available for everything-ties scarves, belts, necklaces-and even plastic pocketed hanging containers for earrings and bracelets.
Keep everything you wear readily visible so you’ll remember what you have.
That way you can actually put it on one morning and feel good about it-instead of finding it 5 years from now, forgotten, neglected, and out of style in a dark corner of your closet collecting dust balls. And that can leave a worse taste in your mouth than an overly salty French tart
Copyright 2008, Leah Oman
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