Every Spring and every Autumn, I would hear this phrase, from my mom, and my grandparents. It would follow with a flurry of activity. Sweaters unpacked from the “chifferobe” and piled onto the bed. Shorts and short sleeve shirts, carried from the drawers, to their cold weather slumber. Uno reverse, and the opposite dance began when the breezy warmth breathed life back through the open windows. As a kid, I enjoyed seeing all the clothes out of their drawers where I could look with curiosity at their clothes so different from my own. I didn’t understand the practicality, honesty, until this year, many, many years later.
Since we moved to Georgia almost a decade ago, we have been without proper dressers which sounds insane, I know. We’ve lived in some places with nice closets, that made storage simple. But we have lived in others where the closets were downright unusable. We’ve used moving totes, fabric dressers from Amazon, cube storage, and zipper totes for comforters. It’s an imperfect system, requiring a lot of digging through bins to find what you are looking for.
I think I have been so pre-occupied with simply organizing these bins, I didn’t think about moving my clothes around seasonally. That was until we bought our house and faced another closet that was challenging. I had hoped our house would have good storage, but that is something, I am learning, that you have to customize to your taste. This place has okay storage in the bedroom, but the problem remains that we need needed more storage like those proper dressers. Of course those are expensive and time consuming to make, the closet being bigger would have let us kick the can farther down the road, instead, God provided a really neat solution.
Our neighbors offered us a chest, a large cabinet really that can either be upright or laid down longways like a trunk. It’s an older piece, that with the dark stain patina, I think looks like a vampire coffin. This chest fits six of these large quilt storage totes! Which means I finally have my “chifferobe” storage piece. The chifferobe name makes me smile because this was not a wardrobe, this was a long trunk that sat at the foot of my grandparents bed, now it lives in my old bedroom at the foot of the bed I sleep in. My mom and grandparents also used trunks to do this. Steamer trunks to be specific, that my great, great grandparents used to immigrate from Ireland to America. Restored to the former glory and it such a convenient way to store clothing for the season.
On the left and in the featured image are the steamer trunks, and to the right, blocked by a suitcase is the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, that Kyle is using as a desk.
Maybe you don’t need to declutter so often, as often as influencers do. Perhaps, you just need a organizing system that makes your closet smaller and manageable for the season you are in, either in a four season climate, or in a state of mind. Putting things into a longer term storage, sort of like moving items out of your backpack in Stardew Valley, into a chest, takes those items out of your daily mental load, without getting rid of them. It’s very clever. Do you store things seasonally? Would you give this a try?
