One of the best quirks of my family is that we have a costume closet. My siblings and I constantly needed costumes throughout our childhood. We appeared in plays, musical/dance performances, and would compete annually for the most bizarre Halloween ideas. My ever-obliging parents (usually mom) would accept every challenge. Since a lot of pieces can be reused from one costume to the next, they started saving and amassing a collection of costumery. When I was in the 6th grade we moved into our new home, which had a lot more storage space, so my mom claimed one of the closets as a costume closet.

Now, I would have thought that costume-use would taper off as we graduated and moved out of the house, but this proved not to be the case. The costumes were used again and again for things like Downton Abbey viewing parties, 4th of July parades, art projects, and occasionally as normal clothes. The closet sees a great deal of rummaging, but very little maintenance. It reached a point of no return becoming an unapproachable mass of garments. My mother was overwhelmed, and asked someone to help her re-organize it. I'm possibly the most organized of the kids, but I also live farthest from home. I hadn't seen how bad the closet had become, not, that is, until after I'd agreed to help clean it...

Step one was simply to get everything out. We have a room with a pool table which became the staging area. It took a while to dig into the mass of clothes. I bought my mom a double-rod clothes rack and found a second one in the garage. These were crucial holding racks for everything we weren't working on at the moment. Then the real work began: we started by sorting everything into categories. The usual suspects: socks, shirts, dresses, masks, etc. were joined by some peculiar new categories: snouts/ears, Hawaiian-themed, fake boobs/bras. I broke out some large ziplock bags and a sharpie to keep categories separate.

As we worked, my mom and I settled into a routine: Her main job was to say what was going to be kept and what would be donated. I would spread out a category (all the scarves for instance) for her to work on, then took care of labeling, folding, hanging, and grabbing the next category to keep things moving.  Probably my biggest contribution to the whole endeavor was energy and focus. She kept stopping and reminiscing, or asking for a second opinion, so I did everything I could to keep the momentum going. With us both working pretty much non-stop, it still took the full day. Even though we filled 6 large trash bags with donation cast-offs, it's a lot more useful to have half as many costumes, and still be able to get at them. What remains is now thoroughly categorized, labeled, hung, boxed, or bagged. Most importantly everything is accessible.