Challenge #2 - Clean Our Your Closet! - Erica's Review

I started strong with this challenge but then fizzled out.

I chose my strongest item first which was shoes! Between our coat closet and bedroom closet, I had 54 pairs of shoes. I donated 15 pairs (28%). I was able to move shoes from the coat closet to the newly spacious rack in our bedroom closet, only keeping downstairs the pairs I wear on a weekly basis which helped clean up the floor of the coat closet which I could then vacuum.

I also had a plethora of scarfs, many handmade by my mother. I donated 6 of the 12 (50%). I also donated 2 of my 7 pairs of gloves (28%), 1 of my 4 hats (25%), 1 of my 10 jackets (10%) and 3 of my 19 purses (16%).

For clothing, I donated 39 items and tossed 26 items (socks with holes, etc).

The ridiculous # of clothing items I have left:

Hanging in the Bedroom Closet - 136 items
In my Dresser (minus underwear, socks, etc...) - 127 items
On the shelf in the closet (hiking/biking clothes) - 22 items

Per his post, Jon donated 59 items (I didn't count the underwear as I didn't include that here). The number of items Jon has left (he didn't count):

Hanging in the Bedroom Closet - 122 items
In his Dresser (minus underwear, socks, and a whole drawer of workout clothes which I was too lazy to try to count) - 124 items
On the shelf in the closet - 28 items
In the coat closet - 10 coats
Shoes - 19 pairs

Well... I must say that my husband's assessment that his clothes are bigger and take up significantly more space appears to have some merit.

I also pack things in better. Here is my sweater drawer:

and T-shirt drawer, the shirts stacked on the right are breastfeeding shirts:

Despite us having nearly identical number of hanging items, I have a ton more open space. Additionally, a whole section of my closet is breastfeeding tops which I did not count. No honey, this does not mean you get some of my space ;-)

Somehow Jon's side is still full from end to end (his clothes are bigger argument). Despite it still looking full, he really did free up some space. If I shove things aside, I can now hang up a shirt on his side without difficulty!

Challenge assessment (so very, very approximate as math is not my strong suit!) -

I met my 10% goal
Jon cleaned out 20%

But -

We did not delve into our son's closet. I did look and the only items in there are my wedding dress (still uncleaned since 2014, that's been on my to-do list for years now) and a bunch of Jon's suits.

We are also still in possession of all our donations (challenge fail). We had several baby items to donate as well so I scheduled a pick up with Salvation Army. The earliest date we could get was tomorrow which was perfect because we have family coming into town for Labor Day weekend and they arrive tomorrow. Unfortunately, I've just received a message that our pickup needs to be rescheduled...so now we are in exactly the place I didn't want to be... With bags of stuff sitting around and company arriving.

Things I've learned...

The hardest part of the challenge was finding time to post on the blog about it!

Don't expect Jon to be excited about (or do) menial time consuming tasks like counting items of clothing.


What will our next challenge be??? I told Jon it was his turn to pick :-)

Challenge #2 - Clean Out Your Closet! - Jonathan's Progress Update

For reference, here is the closet. My side is on the left.

I did a major cleanup of my closet and drawers and compiled a pretty hefty donation pile/bag. In total, I gathered 7 dress shirts, 4 sweaters, 3 pairs of dress shorts, 1 suit jacket, 2 pairs of shoes, 5 vests, 2 hats, 20 pairs of underwear, 17 tee shirts, 13 polo shirts, 2 workout shirts, and 3 pairs of workout shorts. With the exception of the underwear, everything is going to be donated.

I'm not saying I'm done, but to me, this was a pretty major cleanup and a large amount of clothes for me to get rid of. I know Erica will look at our closet and scoff at how many dress shirts I still have, but I still like them and think one day I will end up wearing them again. Just because we never go out anymore doesn't mean I don't want to keep them for when we do get chances to go out and dress nicely.

Am I at the 40% reduction point?? Probably not even close. If I had to estimate, I'd say I was closer to a 20% reduction right now. But consider that when Erica moved in, I got rid of so much stuff that I'm already "pared down". Yes, I have a lot of clothes, but maybe I'm just a closet fashionista... probably more sentimental than anything. I'm just too attached to old concert tee shirts and sweatshirts from shows I went to in the 90s and 00s, tee shirts from college, tee shirts from high school, and generally stuff that brings back good memories. Despite being someone who loves photography, I'm still not sold on just having a photo of my memorabilia as being just as good as the original.

I'm sure she'll write about her own experience, but Erica also decided to toss some of her shoes. She says she doesn't want to be taller than me when wearing some of her shoes with heels. I don't really care. Frankly I think it's funny. I'm short, there is no use in pretending.

Challenge #2 - Clean Out Your Closet!

I came across Project 333 on the Becoming Minimalist Blog and it was also featured in The Minimalists' Documentary. In brief, the challenge is to dress in 33 items for 3 months, with a few exceptions per the rules:

The 33 items include clothing, accessories, jewelry, outerwear, and shoes. They do NOT include wedding ring (or other jewelry you never take off), underwear, sleep wear, in-home lounge wear, and workout clothing (that you only wear to workout). The Project Website is HERE.

This would not be a challenge for my husband and I as we both pretty much already dress in only 33 pieces of clothing. I work from home, plus am breastfeeding. I bet if I use the exclusions from the project, I wear maybe 15 pieces of clothing max. My husband wears the same shirts, pants, and shoes to work every week.

Our issue is not in what we are wearing, but in actually getting rid of things we have but never wear. Considering we both easily require less than 33 items for our daily lives plus workout clothes and sleep wear, we have an extraordinary amount of clothing, shoes, and accessories which we do not need.

Challenge #1 - Blog Every Day for a Week - Recaps

Erica - Our first challenge has come to an end and my husband is proving (not surprisingly) to have a lot of great ideas for challenges to come! The main problem is time! Time for planning and for implementation. I don't think we should run challenges back to back. We need a few days to reflect and write our recaps and plan for the next challenge. I think it's less important to always start the challenge on a specific day of the week. What's wrong with Tuesday, for example ;-). Not every challenge will require daily blogging either, but perhaps we want to do daily Instagram updates just to keep things accountable and anyway pictures are more fun!

Jonathan - Time is the greatest challenge. If only the day was like 5 hours longer, right? I want to dedicate some time to making this a worthwhile project, but I don't want to sacrifice my time with my wife and kids. I think Erica and I can reevaluate how we spend our alone time together and perhaps focus it better into time to do our challenges and write about it.

Challenge #1 - Blog Every Day of the Week - Daily Posts

Day 1 - Jonathan
I'm online in the morning rather than night because Erica took Henry for a play date. Lucas is napping and I had some time to get on my computer (after a lengthy Windows update). I made a quick grammatical correction and updated my time worked last night. I actually spent extra time getting the naked domain name to work.

Day 1 - Erica
I'm online quick during nap time. I want to use this challenge to find the best time of day for me to work online. Is it in the morning before the kids get up at 7:30? Is it in the evening after I finish exercising but before bed? My personal project is a "mom" blog. I try to do at least one post per week on that blog, with pictures. Also, as part of that project, I read several mom blogs and comment on posts. Time always goes by much faster than I anticipate, so I'd also like to be more productive. But now the dryer has stopped so it's laundry time instead.

Read on...

Challenge #1 - Blog Every Day for a Week

This is the inaugural challenge for challengeyourspouse.com. As the first challenge, in a very meta fashion, I challenge Erica to contribute something, anything, to the site once per night. It could be a post, a photo, a random page, something about herself, a font update, a correction, anything. But I ask that she document what she did and her experience in getting on the computer or iPad and actually doing some blogging.

On my first day... I bought the domain name, setup the host, wrote a short bio page, and created this initial blog post. It took me about 90 minutes total. It's almost midnight and after a long day of grocery shopping, hosting some company to the house, taking care of the kids, I'm pretty tired. Tomorrow will be a bigger challenge when Game of Thrones is on.