New Uses for Old Clothes

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Like a lot of you probably are, I've been using my stay at home time to Marie Kondo parts of my house. (I've also been using the time to obsessively play Ultimate Jewel and eat miniature Snickers bars, but we're not going to talk about that.) I had effectively empty nested for over a year when first the Maine Millennial came home with half an apartment's worth of stuff. Okay, I figured, we'll shove things any which way until after Christmas, and then we can work on finding more permanent storage.

In March, of course, Youngest came home from U Maine, bringing with her Guest Son. He traveled pretty light, but she somehow seemed to have MORE clothing, bedding and knick-knacks than she had at the beginning of the year. 

This old house began to feel claustrophobic. Any closets we have were added in sometime around WWII, and the combination of carving out space from preexisting rooms and the fact people simply didn't own as much clothing at that time means you could fit ALL six closets (yes, that's right, six closets for 3000 square feet) into the average modern-build walk-in master closet.

But! What we lack in closets, we make up for with an attic. It's a full, pull down the stairs and walk around over the entire second floor attic, complete with ominous single lightbulb, mice, and unfashionable (in 1820) floorboards that are, no lie, close to two feet wide in places.

So...many... clothes...

The problem is, after living here for twenty-six years, the attic is full to bursting. So in the domino logic of storage, getting stuff out of the living room and library and parlour meant heading up to the bedrooms, and making space in the bedrooms meant removing out-of-season and seldom-used items to the attic, and finding space for them meant getting rid of at least 30% of what had been stored over the years.

It's a work very much in progress, but we're getting there. We brought down and donated luggage we have no use for anymore, boxes of Ross's old papers (The Maine Millennial wrote about them) and my fave, the "boxes full of odds and ends we threw in during a pre-holiday cleaning frenzy," which of course were meant to have been retrieved and sorted right away, but instead languished for years unattended.

What is this? Why did we keep it in the first place?

Then of course, there were the boxes of clothing. Not the many, many tubs full of children's clothes we haven't gotten to yet. These are my clothes, neatly labeled in order of ascending size, dating back to the early 1980s. Many of you reading this are at or close to the same weight you were in 1985. I am not (cf, mini Snickers, above.) I tend to be pretty rigorous about tossing clothing that doesn't fit anymore, but there are always some pieces that are either too nice, or too sentimental to toss - and besides, I could always go back down to a size 12 again, right?

Wrong. The first thing I discovered going through my old clothes is dress size inflation - my size 12s are the same dimensions as today's size 10. I've always had an image of myself as being, well, on the plump side, so imagine my shock at seeing my willowy Youngest daughter fitting perfectly into outfits I remember wearing to work in DC. Readers, I was svelte and never even knew it.

The second thing I've discovered is that it pays to buy classics. Youngest snatched up multiple skirts, blouses and sweaters, which she proclaimed "back in style - as long as we get rid of the shoulder pads." A lot of snipping later, and she has a new wardrobe of silk, linen and 100% cotton.

The third thing I noticed, while laundering everything, was how many items of clothing I had that had been made in the USA. By members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union! Honestly, that made me kind of sad. We could use those kind of good union jobs again.



The fourth thing I realized was that even well-made clothing needs to be given away when your lifestyle has changed. Those small sizes that look so chic on Youngest will be perfect for her, a young woman heading for a career in international affairs or politics. Even if they fit me, I have no need for linen skirts, silk blouses or structured sweater jackets any more. Nor will I ever wear the clothes that are very close to my current size that I picked up during an inexplicable boho phase in my forties. What was I thinking of? Lacy knits and fringe are SO not me.

At the end, we have three boxes of clothing to donate, a bunch more in Youngest's room (still not enough closet space...) and a few sentimental pieces that are going back up in new, sturdier polyprophelene bins. Stay tuned for my next JRW week, dear readers, when I will have made it around to 26 years worth of Christmas decorations...

Clutter inspires and sparks joy

HALLIE EPHRON: I've been talking (and talking and talking) about my book this week, and I often get asked about the serendipity of CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR coming out when Marie Kondo's philosophy and methodology for decluttering caught fire. (Today Google turns up nearly 48 million hits for the term "decluttering;" 9 million for Marie Kondo; 2.3 million for "spark joy.")

The truth is: pure luck. I started writing about being married to pack rat when Marie Kondo was 14 years old, when I'm sure she had not yet perfected her methodology for folding socks. I started writing this book four years ago.

What inspired me was my husband. 

I'm not a collector. Jerry loves his stuff. He collects old illustrated books, hotel soaps and shampoos, vintage fans, porcelain-based milkshake machines, twist ties, radios... He carries around so many pens in the pocket of his jeans, it amazes me that his pants stay up.

For decades, I've been writing about what my professional organizer friend Kathy Vines calls our "mixed marriage." Foraging around in my hard drive, I found an essay I wrote in 1998. It begins:

This morning my 90-year-old neighbor was up on a step ladder, washing the eight windows that surround her porch. After that, she vacuumed her sidewalk, the cord snaked like an umbilicus up the steps and through the front door.

By the street, she set out tidy rows of paint cans alongside pieces of lumber and plumbing innards. Beside these, she planted a hand-lettered sign: “FREE.”

Just watching her inspires me. Suddenly I’m ready to tackle that walk-in clothes closet I haven’t been able to walk into for months.

I know my husband will be inspired as well – inspired to clean the gutters and rake the lawn so he'll be in position to grab off any of the neat stuff she throws out.

 I never found a publisher for that piece, but many of the things my husband has collected over the years have made it into my fiction. And that 90-year-old neighbor inspired the old woman in my novel THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN. (For anyone who remembers that book, yes, my husband really did drag home a wicker trunk.)

Our basement is one of the settings in CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. I wanted to take pictures to share with you all, but Jerry asked me not to. So you're going to have to use your imagination. Or read the book.

Another setting is a self-storage unit. You know, the kind where Clarice Starling found... never fear, you won't find a jarring discovery like that in one of my books.

Self-storage is a $40 billion business, thanks to baby boomers like my husband and me. Last year, one in eleven Americans were renting self-storage so they could hang onto their stuff. One article reported that the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times. 

'Fess up: Do you rent self-storage and what do you keep there?

Free: Chapter 1 of CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Free: Chapter 2 of CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Free: Chapter 3 of CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Getting A Clue

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Champagne and confetti—hurray for the wonderful Catriona McPherson, who just won the coveted LEFTY award for best humorous novel! Yay! And I don’t even think she’s left-handed.

She is endlessly hilarious, and brilliant, but you know, we all have our personal lacunae. I, for instance, still have the tiniest bit of trouble keeping track of left and right.   And sometimes the simplest thing will be revealed—and when I mention it, everyone is baffled. You didn’t KNOW that? they’ll ask. Like yesterday, I was wondering why sometimes we refer to stomachs as  tummies. The moment I asked myself the question, myself answered. But seriously, I’d never thought of that before. And the Morton Salt slogan, when it rains, it pours? Took me decades to realize what that meant.

Anyway. Sometimes personal revelations take a bit of time. As our dear Catriona has also learned.

The Life Changing Magic of Getting a Clue

  by Catriona McPherson 

Sometimes writing is work. Sometimes it really isn’t. Lexy Campbell moved into her houseboat, moored in the slough behind the Last Ditch Motel, at the end of SCOT FREE. In SCOT AND SODA we’re busy making it her own. I drew floorplans and sketches, while she arranged her larger possessions and stowed her smaller ones. (I also made a few visits to the real “Creek House”. It’s on the Hyde Street Pier, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, open to the public and absolutely irresistible to anyone who loved dolls’ houses as a wee girl.)

Lexy’s houseboat isn’t spacious: the kitchen is titchy – her American friends feel that anyone with a fridge that size is basically camping; the wardrobe space will never cope if shoulders come back; and the bathroom- Actually, that’s very practical. You automatically wash the entire place every time you have a shower.

Lexy is coping very well with the space restrictions. She’s organised, methodical and clutter-free. I’m quite clutter-free too. But organised? Methodical? Here are three examples of my housekeeping genius. You tell me.

I’ve got two and a half baths. (Like Lexy, I always wondered about half-baths. Wouldn’t the water run out?) There are cupboards and shelves in all two and a half of them. For six years, I kept the toilet paper supply in another room entirely. Then I realised that was daft and decided it should be kept in a bathroom. For another year, I wondered which one. Finally, I had a brainwave. Buy three lots of loo roll and store one in each place with a loo. Tah-dah!

Then there was the thing with the mosquito screen. I’ve got two opening windows in my bedroom. Only one has a screen on it. (I could get a screen for the other one. I never have.) The screen happened to be on the window not very near the bed. So, in the summer, I dragged the bed out into the middle of the room, nearer the screened window. One day, about eight years in, I was washing the windows and, as usual, I took the screen off to do so. Brainwave! Put the screen back on the other window! The one near the bed! And never drag a lump of Victorian mahogany halfway across a room again! Eight years.

Even that’s not as bad as the mugs. I’ve got too many mugs. I’ve got huge tea mugs and more modest coffee mugs. For storage I’ve got some hooks and a shelf.  For nine years, unless there were some in the dishwasher, I couldn’t store them all. Now I can.

Did you see why? After nine years, I realised that big mugs are bigger and take more space on the shelf, whereas small mugs are smaller and take less. And every mug takes the same number of hooks: exactly one. So now the big mugs hang up and the small mugs go on the suddenly roomy shelf. Nine. Years.

Marie Kondo is not shaking in her slippers.

If you want to make me feel better about all of this, you could confess your own long-delayed penny-drops. Or you could pass on your favourite household organising tips.  You know there’s a fair chance I need them.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We had a cleaning person once who moved EVERYTHING in the kitchen—to a way more logical place. The coffee stored NEAR the coffee maker, canyouimagine? All the forks in the silverware holder facing the same direction? Whoo.  And if you turned the wastebasket to face the other direction, it didn’t show under the counter. WHY didn’t I think of that?

So how about you, Reds and Readers? Any recent “Duh!?” moments?

Catriona McPherson is the multi-award-winning and best-selling author of historical detective novels, set in Scotland in the 1930s and featuring aristocratic sleuth Dandy Gilver. She also writes darker - that’s not difficult - contemporary standalones, including the Edgar finalist THE DAY SHE DIED. After eight years as an immigrant in northern California, she started the Last Ditch trilogy, written with love and no judgement (honest) about her new home.  SCOT & SODA  (“frightfully funny” – PW) comes out on Monday.

Find Catriona online: Facebook, Twitter,  www.catrionamcpherson.com.

The Tidying of Books

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Recently our local online magazine had a guest piece by an interior designer on how to style your bookshelves. It wasn't until two-thirds of the way through that she said, "And you can even use actual books!"

I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Really? Books on bookshelves? What a concept!

But I have to admit one can go too far in the other direction. While I have been writing, and focused on other things, the books have been breeding.

It's time to do one of my least favorite things--a book purge. These shelves are partly the to-read books, but other things--obviously--get stuck in here, too. And it's not that I want to fill the shelves with decorative accessories--I just want the books not to be stacked three deep and threatening life and limb every time I walk by!

I should probably mention that this is only one side of my office. There are NINE other identical bookcases scattered throughout the house, plus two full height bookcases, and the piles of books on both my desks and on every other surface in the sun porch. And Wren's books, which are stacked on a trunk in the guest room.

Marie Kondo's THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP is all the rage again, with her new Netflix series. It has erroneously been shared that Marie says you should only have THIRTY BOOKS, but she didn't actually say that. I checked. She said you should only keep books that "spark joy", which can be wildly different from one person to another.

But when books are your job as well as your passion, deciding which ones "spark joy" is daunting. There is a lot of guilt involved--books I meant to read but haven't, books I thought might be useful for research but haven't opened, books I thought I would reread...but, will I really? Am I ever going to find the time to read Wolf Hall? Or A Suitable Boy? Or a few dozen (um, hundred) others?

AND, I had been promising my daughter for at least a year that I'd help her clean out her living room bookshelves--because a large majority of the books were mine. Last Sunday, we tackled that. (There's another identical built-in case on the other side of her fireplace.) She ended up with ten full shopping bags to take to Half Price Books--and I brought home four bagfuls that I have nowhere to put!

So, dear REDS and readers, do you have a system for keeping books under control? Which ones stay and which ones go? Please share!!

PS: Here's Kayti's Marie Kondo-worthy "after" shelves!

Don't worry, book lovers. This state of bareness will not last!

What We're Writing: Hallie's parachute jumpsuit

• HALLIE EPHRON: Fanfare! It's WHAT WE'RE WRITING WEEK! I go first with this  condensed excerpt from CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR (August 2019, Wm Morrow) which seems utterly appropriate after last week's take-down of fashion trends (thanks, Julia!) 
  

Background: Emily Harlow is a 30-something professional organizer. She's filming a ritualized (see Marie Kondo) clearing-out of her own closet, keeping only those items that spark joy, when she comes across turquoise jumpsuit that brings back memories. A decision looms... 

PS: I really did have a turquoise "parachute jumpsuit" which I loved. I wore it so many times that I wore out the seat. Here's the only picture I can find: a headless me wearing it at my daughter's 7th birthday party.

 

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR by Hallie Ephron - first ever peek

What have you held onto even though you know you'll never wear it again... though fashion trends go around and come around, so you never know!

Inspired by what she wore: Hallie's turquoise jumpsuit

HALLIE EPHRON: I’ve just turned in the manuscript for my new novel, Careful What You Wish For. It will come out NEXT summer. I often wonder, what do publishers do in the 9-12 months it takes to get a book in print. I shouldn’t complain, though, because it takes me at least two years to write one.
 
The story was inspired by the decluttering craze set off by Marie Kondo. With clothing, for example, her method involves getting rid of everything that doesn’t “spark joy,” and carefully smoothing, folding, and putting away the things that do.

My book is about a married couple. Emily is a professional organizer who helps people declutter their lives. Her husband Frank can’t pass up a yard sale. Its working title was Folding Frank.

I looked to my own closet (and marriage, but don't tell anyone) for inspiration. At the back of my closet I found a turquoise zippered parachute jumpsuit that I’d bought in California in about 1980. It inspired this passage:

Emily picked up a turquoise zippered jumpsuit that she’d bought in Venice Beach. She’d been a different person back then, just out of college and getting her teaching degree. Frank was an idealistic, newly minted attorney, committed to human rights and equality, and about to start what would be a two-year stint working in the Massachusetts Public Defender’s office.

That had been more than ten years ago, before being poor had gotten old. Back then she’d never have considered wearing tailored pants and a blazer, and her romance with the camera had just begun.

She shook out the jumpsuit and held it under her chin in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the bedroom door. With her long dark hair and bangs, Emily didn't look all that different from the way she'd looked when she'd first tried on the jumpsuit. She'd worn it with the sleeves rolled and the cuffs pegged, belted with a grommet-studded military-surplus belt. The get-up had attracted attention from passers-by on Newbury Street in Boston, but when a bartender at Sonsie had asked where she'd bought it, she felt it had been given the ultimate stamp of approval.

Emily ran her palms across its soft fabric. Raised the zipper all the way and straightened the stand-up collar. No, the outfit did not remind her of a younger Frank so much as Emily herself--at least the juicier, less mousey self that she hoped she hadn’t inadvertently consigned to some rubbish bin on her journey from free spirit to elementary-school teacher and on to professional organizer, imposing rows and right angles on a chaotic world.

Today's question: What’s hanging in your closet right now that you’ve kept just because it reminds you of another you?
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The Life-Changing Magic of Julia Tidying Up

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I may be the last woman in America to hear of KonMari, and that's okay; I'll own it. I had heard about some super Japanese organizing method back when Marie Kondo's first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, was published, but the only thing I knew was A) it involved folding T-shirts like origami figures and B) it required you to talk to your socks.

Now, I am not a naturally organized person - far from it. I've learned over the years that the more detailed the system, the less likely I am to stick to it. Which is why, for instance, my tax file is a large picnic basket into which I throw all bills, papers, receipts, etc. that I might need by April 15. "But Julia," I hear you say, "It must take you forever to get all that in order come tax-time." The answer is yes, it does take quite a few hours of sorting and entering into a spreadsheet for my accountant. However, it took longer the years when I would sort my bills, papers, receipts, etc. into pre-labeled folders for one month, after which they were left strewn about the house until I started having panic attacks in March.

All of which is to say I was happy to let the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up pass me by. But no more! Yes, friends, I have seen the light, and Konverted. (Okay, that was a horrible pun.) I was following along in one of the blogs I mentioned yesterday as the blog author (blogther?) cleaned out and organized her closets the KonMari way. That doesn't look too complicated, I thought. So I checked out the book and read it.

One of Kondo precepts struck a chord with me right away. Her goal is not to teach you how to buy and use better storage systems; it's to get rid of enough stuff so the storage you have works. To achieve this, you don't pick what you're going to throw away. You choose what you want to keep - those things that "spark joy" in you. I decided to translate that into clothes I always felt good in, the items I got compliments on when I wore them, or the outfits I would put on and say to myself, "Damn, girl, you look good."

I wish I had thought of the blog and taken snaps when I sorted my closet! However, I've created a photojournalistic account of KonMari'ing one drawer - my black, gray and white summer things. (The book says take ALL your clothes out before you sort, but there was no way I was going to take two days to collect everything including the winter things in the attic. I'm quite comfortable with doing it a bit at a time.)

Here's my drawer before KonMari - not too bad, if you ignore the fact it's in my bathroom because my bedroom dresser was too full...

I took everything out and dumped it on the bed. The book says to put it on the floor, but I think maybe that's a cultural thing? Or maybe Marie Kondo doesn't have two cats who would eagerly walk all over her clothes and then lie down on them.

So the technique is to pick up each item and see if it sparks joy. My daughters (who believe me, could both use a heavy dose of KonMari in their rooms, which by the way they refused to let me photograph for the blog) pointed out no one's underwear sparks joy. (Well, not the stuff you actually wear throughout the day. There are a few specialty items...) But there's nothing wrong with choosing to keep things that have utilitarian value. I kept several long-sleeve undershirts because they keep me warm in my drafty house during the winter, and that sparks joy.

As you sort, Kondo says to give thanks to the clothing you're letting go, and to acknowledge the item has done its service to you. Since I, unlike Kondo, am not a practitioner of Shintoism, I chose to think about the people who might benefit from my donations. (My church sponsors a "St. Elizabeth's Pantry" for non-food items, and my town has a Community Clothing Closet - both of which are open to anyone who walks in.)

The Shih Tzu is of course optional to the KonMari process.

And here's my drawer after. You can't quite see it, but there's empty space in the back! Kondo instructs one to fold clothing in a very particular way, and I was too lazy to watch the folding videos on YouTube. So I rolled my shirts and sweaters like I would when packing a suitcase.

The final result: these are the clothes headed for the donation boxes! Obviously, that's from my closet and my dresser, not just the one drawer...  Around October, I'll bring down the winter clothes and take another crack at them. Meanwhile, I have yet to start the next phase of the decluttering and organizing: books. I expect that will be much harder than clothing. I'll keep you posted.

So tell me, dear readers, have any of you KonMari'd? How do you like to organize?