How Much Stuff Do You Really Need?

I know this is a question that can be answered in a lot of different ways and it's very personal as well but really, how do you know when enough is enough?

I recently went through my closet and got rid of everything I thought looked drab. Okay, I didn't actually get rid of anything. I stashed it in the storage room but if it stays there long enough it'll be donated... eventually. I was wearing old gray T-shirts around the house all the time and most of them were threadbare with holes. I kept all the nicer clothes, the stuff I considered "town clothes" or "church clothes" to wear for everyday. The problem is that I liked my comfy T-shirts and now I miss them. I stole my husband's smaller gray T-shirt and I'm not giving it back.  And I also found that my nice clothes aren't very comfortable. So instead of going back to my old clothes I've decided to just keep less clothes in the rotation and also slowly buy a few nicer things to wear that are also comfortable.

I hate doing laundry and it seems like there's no end to it so I thought to myself, how many clothes do I really need? Bare minimum I think I can get by with three T-shirts, two pair of jeans, four nicer tops, seven pair of underwear, three pair of socks, and a few bras. I don't leave the house most days so I hardly ever need socks anyway. That's not many clothes but if I washed them once a week I'd have plenty. I did the same with my daughter's clothes. I bagged up all the clothes that wouldn't fit in her closet just so we wouldn't be tempted to string them out. I did all the laundry in the house and put it all away and then gave her a drawer for her small amount of clothes. She actually had more clothes in the rotation than I did but she likes to change her clothes a lot, sometimes three or four times a day, so I just went with what would fit in the drawer comfortably. My husband gets pretty dirty at work and so I know he'll have a lot more clothes to wash but I think I'll probably only have to do maybe three loads of laundry a week to keep up with everything. My closet is only half full and I like that. I think I'm ready to donate what I packed up of my clothes and start paring down the dishes in the kitchen.

This little experiment really got me to thinking about how much stuff we really need and use. Do I really want to take care of a bunch of stuff I don't need? It's so much easier to find the mates to my daughter's socks now. Used to she'd wear them once and then we'd never see the other again. And now she can reach her clothes herself to pick them out.

I know what you're thinking. I didn't really do anything by limiting ourselves to how many clothes we could wear in a week. We still have the same amount of clothing dirty but this way I'm not tempted to put off doing the laundry just because we still have clean clothes to wear, leaving a pile a mile high to wash and put away. My bedroom is clean now, I'm happy, my husband is happy, and my daughter is happy. The only one who isn't happy is my mother-in-law who likes to buy new clothes for my daughter on a weekly basis. :/

If you want to get rid of anything the best thing to do is to put it away in a storage area for a while. Then when some time has passed and you haven't missed those things, just toss or donate them. Don't even open the box.

How many items of clothing do you really need? How many pair of shoes?