Forty Days And Forty Tights: What to Do When Your Wardrobe is Flooded with Too Much Stuff.

Forty Days and Forty Tights: What to Do When your Wardrobe is Flooded with too Much Stuff!

I recently asked my husband if he had started taking martial arts again. “Why do I look more toned?” he asked. Well, unless you call a beer gut toned, the answer would be a definite “No!” I told him what prompted the question was the black and blue bruises he had on his body. “Oh, that??!” he explained, “That’s from walking into the dresser drawers you leave open that I accidently walk into! Why the hell don’t you close them???”

The answer is simple. I don’t close my drawers because I can’t. My massive mission dresser is filled to capacity. In short, the drawers are stuffed with too much “stuff.”

My husband then proceeded to ask precisely what I keep in these drawers that now can be classified as a lethal weapon. “Tights” I tell him. “Tights?” he responds incredulously? “How many tights can you possibly have?” he asked.

I had no clue. So I set to find out how many actual pairs of tights I own. His guess was forty.  Mine was twenty. So I dump my drawer out onto the bed and despite my math-phobia, I counted. And guess how many tights I had?

Forty! I own forty pairs of tights. Opaque, ribbed, matte, fishnet, shiny.  Forty pairs!!! And that does not count pantyhose!  And the kicker, which is no surprise, for a NYC girl, is that TWENTY-NINE PAIRS were BLACK!

2 brown, 3 gray, 1 purple, 1 pink, 1 leopard print (yes, leopard print) and 3 were colors I just don’t have the vocabulary to describe (muddy beige? Speckled Sand? , Ugly Mushroom? I don’t know).

So basically, my husband, concludes, that I can go forty days, without doing laundry, and never wear the same tights twice.  41 days, if you count the pair of reversible SPANX (A brilliant invention: one side is black, the other grey, it is two pairs of tights in one that make you look five pounds thinner!)

Then there is the drawer that holds my workout clothes. I can get a workout just trying to pull that damn jammed drawer open myself! I like to work out. Okay, maybe I don’t like to work out, but I need to. Having appropriate workout gear is a great motivator. So over the years I bought a lot of workout pants.

So once again, out go the drawer’s contents, onto my bed.  I learn that I have a lot of workout pants. 30 of them! Capris, Yoga Pants, classic sweats. And no, I am not counting the ones I sleep in, or the trendy velour ones the fashion marketers classify as “lounge-wear.” Like really, who wears sweats to a lounge anyway? I usually wear a little black dress, but that’s just me!

So basically, if I worked out every day for a month, I could wear a different pair of workout pants each day and not have to do any laundry! But then my apartment would really smell, wouldn’t it? So I tossed ten shabby pairs from my not-so-shabby- skinny-years and bought a gallon of Tide.

My point is that it is important to know what you have in order to know what you need. If you think you need more tights or sweatpants, you are going to inevitably buy them, regardless of whether or not you have 30 pairs in your closet! So I embarked on what I call Project De-clutter (see next month's post) where I am taking inventory of all my “stuff” before I buy one single new thing.  Although J. Crew did have this great pair of pink tights on sale….please don’t tell my husband!

Me in my famous leopard skin tights! A must-have for every woman's wardrobe!