This morning when I woke up, that darned closet was still on my mind. It's bad... Really, really bad... A huge part of the problem (aside from the obvious packrat habits of this household) is the total lack of storage space in this house. It's a very old house. I mean pre-plumbing, pre-heating, pre-closet old. Most people these days complain about the closets in their homes being too small. Mine are nonexistant. Once upon time, people didn't have enough clothing to warrant a closet. They had a wardrobe, and it held everything they owned.
I also do not have a functional attic or basement. There's no garage. So, we have to fit it all in the house with the day-to-day stuff... And there are exactly 4 closets to try to contain everything. Two closets are downstairs - one in the entryway for coats and such; one in the dining room for... I'm really not sure what they would intend such a closet for; perhaps linens? There is a closet in the upstairs hallway, which is used for storing holiday stuff. The final closet is in my bedroom. I have clothes in it along with a whole lot of there-is-nowhere-to-put-it stuff.
When it comes to organizing the closet, the clothes aren't the challenging part. It's the rest that is going to be tough. So, this is what I started with this morning:
Most organizing pros tell you to take everything out of the closet first. They may suggest you sort it into piles as you do so. Jennifer Ford Berry takes a different approach in her book Organize Now, suggesting instead that you purge first. You'll create two piles (I went straight to the black bags with my stuff), one for donating and one for trash. I like the purge first idea because I can just imagine (especially with other things happening today) pulling everything out of the closet and still having half of it sitting in the bedroom at bedtime.
I figured we should start with clothes first. So, I sent the hubby in to deal with his things. I thought it would take him a bit to sift through his stuff, but he was done in less than 5 minutes. Drat! Procrastinating options all used up, I jumped in and in about 20 minutes had the clothes down to just this much:
I was ruthless! It felt great!!! A whole lot of deliberating followed at this point. This closet still has to do double duty - clothing and storage. There's just no way around it. In the interest of making as much progress in the house as a whole, DH and I agreed that everything stored above the clothes bars stays for now. It doesn't belong anywhere else in the house and agonizing over it could become too time consuming. Focusing on the floor and such we found lots to purge and sorted the rest. Then a decision was made that the now available storage space will be used for my work stuff, which now takes up space in 4 rooms. Getting it all into one location will be wonderful.
In order to make the most of the available space, I decided to move all the clothes over with the sweater holders. Jennifer Ford Berry has a video on her site with some tips for closet organizing. One thing she suggests is using all the same hangers. It gives a nice uniform look to the closet rod. She suggests some really cool hangers that I would love to have, but not right now. I sorted through and found as many of the same hangers as possible and was at least able to find enough white to do the job, not all exactly the same but close enough. (I had to keep a few really heavy things on different hangers.) The end result:
All the extra hangers went into a box and got donated. Craft- type stuff that was hanging out in here got moved downstairs. The big dream is to turn the dining room closet into a craft closet. For now it will go onto the shelves in the office that have been holding some of my work stuff.
Getting the shelves and all my work goodies in here is going to take some time. I'll work at it little by little over the next few days.
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