End of year review

At the start of a New Year it seems appropriate to review the progress that I’ve made with my own personal Project 333 in 2014. It took a while to get going and I suspect that this is common with many people who are contemplating the challenge of minimalism­ – it certainly seems to be a common theme on many of the websites dedicated to the art. In August I celebrated the first year anniversary of my permanent move to France. It was the first time in seven years that we had amalgamated all of our ‘stuff’ together in one place. Although I now worked from home I’d kept all of my work suits and business clothes, some hanging on the clothes rails that cluttered my oppressive office and the rest in a huge suitcase under the spare bed. I had no wish to go back to that lifestyle but I was hanging on the clothes like some sort of insurance policy. It seemed that I was not alone, as the question was raised on one of my facebook groups and it seemed that many were reluctant to part with the remnants of their old lives, someone had a wardrobe full of business clothes that hadn’t seen the light of day for seven years.

 

Around September time I discovered Project 333, or rather re-discovered it, as I had come across the concept and the website in the past on websites like Mr Money Moustache and the Money Saving Expert forums. I started with an inventory of items, with the clothing only (no shoes or accessories) reaching a total of 180. Since then I’ve had two attempts at different capsule wardrobes, an Autumn capsule which covered the tail end of September and October, and now the current Winter capsule which is likely to last until at least the end of February.

There have been several purges, so many that I’ve lost count of the number of trips to the clothes recycling container. So far, at least ten bags of clothes and two bags of shoes have gone. Since the construction of the new wardrobes OH is now on side and we have imposed a strict one in, one out rule. The current spreadsheet shows that my total of clothes now stands at 115 items, a reduction of 36%.

Few new clothes came into the house in the early part of the year, the exceptions being some M&S jeans and a fleece I had to buy to wear whilst on an emergency trip back to the UK. Once I decided to commit to re-designing the technical wardrobe clothes shopping has been restricted to Decathlon in France and online shopping at Rohan. The new additions comprised:

o   Two Quechua fleeces (grey and blue)

o   Quechua trousers (grey and black)

o   Rohan Travel Jeans

o   Ten pairs of socks

o   Rohan green zip top

o   Rohan green ls shirt

o   Rohan pink ls shirt

o   Rohan Grey Carrig Crew fleece

o   Rohan blue striped top

o   Rohan black rose microgrid fleece

o   Rohan black rose trousers

It’s taken a few months, but now I wear technical clothing most of the time, not always ‘head to toe’. Surprisingly, it has taken only the few additions above to make the autumn/ winter capsule a colour co-ordinated wardrobe of mostly technical clothing. On paper I’ve worked out clothing combinations for a full 4x3x33 year – 80 items in total, but I have not yet had the courage to take the remaining 35 things to recycling – that is my first resolution of the New Year.