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As I mentioned previously, we lost our luggage recently. We’ve still only gotten one bag back, which means that a good deal of our clothes are still missing. We’ve gone out and replaced quite a bit (I got 3 packs of tank tops at $11.50/pack at Costco, for example) and my husband & son have replaced about half of their missing pants & shirts. I also bought one pair of pants for myself, a pair of shorts, and a skirt. But it still felt like I didn’t have many clothes, except for dress clothes.

We got to talking about hangers though, and decided we would buy some replacement ones that I liked that would be better for our clothes. (They are wooden, and wider than our current plastic ones.) I told my husband that we should get a box, and I’d split it with him. There are 50 to a box, and he thought we’d need two boxes. I couldn’t believe that we could possibly need a hundred hangers, so I went into the closet to count. He had 44 items of clothing (pants & shirts), and I had 40 (pants, shirts, dresses, suits). Good grief. Of course that’s across two seasons (which are pretty much all the seasons we have here — really hot and kinda cool) — but still.

How can I have that many items of clothing (plus more in our missing luggage) and STILL feel like there’s nothing I can really wear? So I examined them more closely.

I have 11 items of dress & business clothes, mostly left over from when I was an advertising salesperson in the 90’s. Do I really need those? Probably not, but since I do wear them every now and then I hang onto them. I have 3 items of clothes that I wear to shoot photos, so I need and use those. I have one raggedy shirt with paint splotches on it that I wear to paint, plus a robe. That leaves 24 things that I actively wear, which are split between pants, shirts & dresses. Some are summer clothes, and some are winter. It still seems like more than I thought, but I guess I can see how it’s possible to be down to about 6 outfits that I can wear to my (extremely casual) work.

Still, I put a couple of items into the Goodwill bag, and will be planning carefully as I buy replacement clothes over the next 3 or 4 months. It seems like such a splurge to be buying wooden hangers for these things, when we already have perfectly good plastic ones. But I can remember when it was a splurge to buy 10 plastic hangers for a dollar instead of sticking with the free ones wire ones that people gave me from their dry cleaning. Back then it was a choice between hangers and eating (Top Ramen) for a few days. So now I will look at my nice new wooden hangers and smile.

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