Can you have too much clothing in your walk in closet
I found out last night. Yes. At about 3AM, the crash startled me from my peaceful dreams and I woke up to find that a 6 foot row of clothes and the corner bracket fell from the wall of my wife's walk in closet. It was scary loud!
I think I can actually get this post to relate to real estate first and then have a little fun at my wife's expense.
When we look for homes, there are certain requirements that are important to my wife and myself. In our case, we want a house that has a lot of storage and we need dual master closets. As you'll come to find out, my wife has a lot of clothes. Actually, so do I. In our master bedroom, we have 2 nicely sized walk in closets. After we moved in, we added significant extra shelving to make the closets even more useful. It turned out to be not enough as my wife seemingly added far more clothing to her wardrobe than the closet could accommodate.
Time for a real estate buyer tip. When looking for homes, it's important that you know what you want before you set out on your home search. A suggestion I make to all my clients is to make a list of what is important to you and what are called "rule outs". So for example, if you want a home with the master bedroom down or a bonus room, if a house doesn't have those features, you don't have to waste any time looking at it. As to the important items, you have to prioritize each of them and while no house will still be perfect (even when you custom build), you can and should get most everything you want. After you view a number of houses, review them by quantity and quality of the items on your priority list are included and determine whether there were any rule outs. It's an organized way to house hunt and I hope that helps.
Now to the fun.
The picture on the left was taken after I removed all the fallen clothes and all the boxes of clothes and other stuff from the top shelf of the row in back. There were shoes flying out of shoe boxes everywhere and I thought I might have married Imelda Marcos. I put the clothes on the sofa in the sitting area which is picture on the right. I noticed that the top rack in back was loose as well and figured that if I lightened the load, it might hold together until the weekend when my wife would return from a business trip and we could take care of repairing and reorganizing.
When I say that my wife has more clothes than she can wear, I noticed when I was cleaning up that she had outfits I have never seen her wear in the 7 years we have been together. She had a number of garments with the store tags still attached. I remember when we moved to Charleston we took a lot of her clothes and mine and donated them to charity rather than just pack and move them.
Figuring that if you don't wear something for a year, you'll likely not wear it the next year, I always go through my closet every year and bring a nice donation of clothing to charity. I thought my wife did the same but apparently, she added back at least that many and more.
I've talked to her today and told her what happened and we do have plans to donate a lot of clothing this weekend. And while I hope that you don't get startled from your sleep with a big clothing crash in the middle of the night anytime soon, take some time this weekend and go through your closet and bring those clothes you haven't been wearing lately to the charity of your choice. Someone will appreciate it.
By the way, my closet is very well organized and holding up nicely.