Tonight my clothes are breathing.

For the past seven and a half years my clothes have lived on a normal sized open clothes rack and in an Ikea chest of drawers.

Over that period of time I have sent many bags of clothes to the op shop, but I have also bought many many more items. Just to give a ballpark idea of how many items of clothing I might have bought in that period, my income is now more than four times what it was when I moved into the house before this one seven and a half years ago. And in that time I have been overseas on shopping trips, er, holidays, at least once a year. Which, for me, means a lot of clothes.

So my clothes rack, even with fairly ruthless weeding out of clothes I don�t wear, has been jam packed for several years now. And the chest of drawers has had the bottom two drawers permanently open for at least a couple of years because I own too many clothes to fit into closed drawers.

And on top of the lack of space there�s the dust. As I�ve mentioned previously, this house is the most dust prone place I�ve ever lived. Let something sit for more than twenty-four hours and it�s covered in a fine - or not so fine - layer of dust. It�s the 12 foot ceilings and the fact the house is over 100 years old.

But today 95% of my clothes left the dust and the cramped quarters and moved into their new, comparatively luxurious home. Into my new walk-in wardrobe.

Although I�m not actually moving until Monday, tomorrow I have a lengthy list of social events to attend, as well as picking Betty up from the airport, so today was my last day of pre-moving moving. So I moved all of my clothes except for a small selection that I might need over the next couple of days, and the ones I washed this morning which are currently hanging in front of the heater drying.

I had already moved most of my shoes last weekend - the only time it�s bad to have 70-odd pairs of shoes is when you have to move them - and today, between rain showers and occasional downpours, the rest of the clothes went. And they�re happy about it.

My sweaters are no longer packed like sardines into a drawer, always getting crushed and treated not nearly as well as they should. My jeans and casual pants are no longer stacked, exposed to the dust, on top of the chest of drawers because they don�t fit anywhere else. My skirts and pants and coats and even my old suits that I don�t wear any more but need to keep in case of work emergencies are no longer so close together that they might as well be one garment. And they�ve been freed from the dozens of dry cleaning bags they used to live in the escape the dust.

Of course most of them will have to go to the dry cleaner to get rid of any residual dust, and thus return to their plastic sheaths, but at least this time it will only be temporary.

In short, tonight my clothes are breathing. They are relaxed, with space between them.

And, of course, space for more to join them.