Spring is my favorite time of year for style and beauty. I love everything about it: pastels and floral prints, stripes and gingham, lace and seersucker, all the chambray things! Unsurprisingly, spring is also when I spend the most on clothes and makeup, so I’m struggling with my low-buy at the moment. I had to check myself this weekend when I tried to justify dropping a wad of cash at Everlane as ‘restocking basics’ to get around my low-buy rules; these ’90s cheeky straight jeans in vintage blue speak to me, and I’d like the clean silk short-sleeve square shirt in every springy shade, please and thank you.

After literally two days of putting items in my cart, deleting them, and putting them back, I took a beat and thought about why I started this low-buy in the first place: to reduce my consumption, eliminate impulse purchases, and spend smarter. If I cheat, it’s not the end of the world, but I’d be cheating myself out of accomplishing the [simple] goals I set at the start of the year; and let’s be real: if can’t follow through with just 6 months of a disciplined shopping strategy, I need this low-buy year more than I realized.

So I cleared my head and my Everlane shopping cart. (But I’ll probably go back for the jeans as my March style pick.)

I took that wanna-buy-stuff energy and put it to work organizing my closet, which has been on my to-do list since I wrote this post at the end of January.

I never bothered rotating my closet for the seasons because we basically wear the same stuff year-round — living in the southeast, our seasons are hot, hotter, a-little-less-hot, and chilly-for-like-a-minute — but last September, I was really inspired by Anna’s seasonal capsule wardrobe and implemented her trick of stowing away spring and summer pieces at the start of autumn. She does this out of necessity as she doesn’t have much closet space, but I liked the idea of streamlining my wardrobe down to my favorite basics for fall and winter and saving my favorite warm weather stuff for the following year. I folded all my breezy tops, white denim, day dresses and sandals, tucked them into these durable woven storage totes to hibernate for the winter, and stored them on the top shelf of my closet.

I brought down those storage totes last weekend, and you guys, it felt like I went on a shopping spree for all new stuff. It made me so happy to get reacquainted with my warm weather inventory and put it all back in regular rotation; my wardrobe feels fresh and updated, and I didn’t buy a thing!

I’m convinced that if I hadn’t packed my spring and summer stuff away and I saw it hanging in my closet all fall and winter, I’d be bored with my wardrobe by now and want an overhaul. (It’s my go-to pattern every year.) Putting it out of sight made me forget about all the great stuff I have, so everything felt exciting again. This weekend I did another seasonal swap and said ‘see ya later’ to my heavy sweaters, boots and cold-weather accessories; now they’re all cozy in the storage totes until next year.

I’m officially a seasonal-closet-flipping convert, y’all, and 10/10 would recommend you try it, too! You don’t need a huge wardrobe to make this trick work for you; in fact, I’m most inspired by edited, minimal collections of thoughtfully chosen pieces and quality basics.

Stay tuned; I’ll post my best tips for maximizing limited closet space + my favorite wardrobe organization tools and tricks in an upcoming post!