Closet Overhaul

There has been a dress-code crackdown at work.  We are technically a business attire environment.  Not business casual.  Business.  That means that many of my male counterparts (and certainly superiors) wear suits everyday.  As you can imagine, the new enforcement has led to the normal rumblings bordering on revolution and some epic co-worker bonding over why "booties" are not professional.

Examples of appropriate workplace wear

For me, it meant a necessary upgrade.

Now, not everyone will experience my luck.  My mother-in-law happened to retire right before I started here, and she gifted me with dozens of pieces from her years in banking and financial loans.  Not everyone is lucky enough to have an MIL as giving or stylish as mine is, but there are some ways to nearly replicate the hand-me-down effect.

1. They give you the chance to take risks at no cost.  No, I would not normally wear floral print pants, but Beckie handed me some for free.  At that price, it's definitely worth trying once.  (And I wasn't shocked when they weren't my thing...)
2. You know the fit.  I can't tell you how many times I have found something I really liked, only to find it was too tight once washed.  To combat this, I started buying things a little bigger, and then it would just be too baggy after a few wears.  The best part about hand-me-downs is that you already know how they will look and fit after a few (or more!) wears.
3. You don't feel too badly parting with it.  I have spent years trying to keep my STUFF at a manageable level.  Clutter, particularly of un- or under-used items, is both difficult for me to manage and something I am desperate to master.  I have seen many different anti-clutter strategies suggesting that you dispose of one piece of clothing when you bring home a new one, and the easiest way I have found of doing this is to have clothing that didn't cost you too much money in the first place.

So, what do you do if you aren't lucky enough to inherit clothing (especially the good stuff)?  My number one suggestion is to go to Goodwill.  Or any other kind of donation-based resale shop.  A Goodwill just opened up down the street from me, and it's been awesome.

My friend Ann sent this to me... can you tell I do a lot of Goodwill?

I like Goodwill for all the reasons I like hand-me-downs (it's so cheap, it's almost free...).  Most resale shops also benefit a good cause, but that's just an added bonus.

Now What?

So, what do you do with all this clothing now that you've got it?  Well, for a few weeks, you fumble around with grabbing shirts at random and wondering if they are work-appropriate before you realize that there has to be a better way.  That's when you sneak a peak at your husband's closet.  It's full to bursting because he's too lazy to get rid of anything, but you know from years of putting his stuff away that it's divided into sections: T-shirts, Polos, button-down work shirts, long sleeve sweaters, casual long-sleeved shirts, and (my personal favorite) sweater vests.  Because Kevin is an inherently organized individual, he knows where all these things are without having to give it a second thought.  For someone like me, this does not come automatically, and so any time I adopt a system, I need to back it up with structural support before I can master it.

I decided that there were two really important distinctions I needed to make: what kind of clothing each piece is (t-shirt, sleeveless, etc) and whether or not I can wear it to work (casual, formal, work).  I ended up with the following list (and yes, I made a flow-chart of my closet; and no, it's not weird):

I bought relatively cheap clothing dividers online (less than $10) and then labeled them up with the different sections above.  However, I went a step further, bought hangers, and color-coded the entire thing, too.  Now, anything that's hanging on a silver hanger is the "formal" category; anything on a white hanger is "casual"; and anything on a black hanger is newly-enforced-dress-code-appropriate.

The "formal sleeveless" shirts getting the silver hanger treatment

Isn't it GLORIOUS?

It wasn't expensive, either.  I had a lot of mish-moshed hangers already; it was just about using them differently.  I had to train myself a little to remember the hanger color when doing laundry, but it saves me so much time on the other end that it's completely worth it.

What would your closet overhaul look like?  You might decide to organize differently, go bold and use green, yellow, and purple hangers, or have funky dividers like these:

Post pics if you decide, like I did, that it's time for a change!