Closet Cleanout

For months and months I have been working on getting my house organized, putting my things in places where I can find them and use them when I want to. So often I think I have an item but I don't know where so I don't do the activity or do a makeshift or worse yet buy another item even though I already have one just because I can't find it.

I don't sit down and sew because my sewing things are disorganized and scattered and there's no work place. I don't do genealogy because my papers are all over and there's no space to spread out and keep notations as I'm gathering the information.

My spare room is packed full of boxes and bags of items. The closet in that room has had Christmas decorations in it but there's so many that it's difficult to maneuver and to get things put back into the correct container.

Recently -- 8 months ago -- I pulled almost everything out of that closet and they have been sitting around various places in my house waiting for me to figure out a way  organize it. I have been going through them and throwing away things I don't want any longer, putting like things together. That project has been taking too long and not making enough progress.

And on top of that, the renovation completely interrupted it all.  Not only did I have to pull drawers out of my bathroom and stack them in random places but also had to move the bins of Christmas things  that I have been going through into wherever place happened to be out of the way at the moment.

I have searched for a couple years for storage that I can compartmentalize all the different projects that I am interested in and keep my materials organized. I'm hampered a bit by cost and I'm hampered a bit by Bryan wanting things done a certain way. He's concerned that having a whole wall covered will impede airflow and cause damage to the paint etc. We have had places where the paint has been damaged and we don't understand why so I can see his caution. Most of the things I have found are cheap open shelving with cardboard backs and plastic shelf holders. But open shelving still looks very cluttered to me and allows dust to get in places.

However closed storage is very rare and very expensive. So I've been working on that slowly but surely for the past 2 years. I have picked up a few things at thrift stores  or off of Craigslist and bought a couple brand new.

Today I was going through my clothing and weeding out items that I don't wear often or don't fit so that I have room in the closet to hang the items that I do wear so that they stay nice looking. I thought if I had a second closet to spread things out or store seldom used items then I would make more headway.

So I went back to the storage room and began to clean out the closet more. I was looking around for options on my clothing project when it suddenly occurred to me that the one shelf that I had found is low and would fit **into** the closet.  This would allow me to sort out seasonal items instead of everything being packed into totes and having to pull out 3 totes to get to the one I want at the moment. It would also leave its wall space available for a taller shelf.

And that is what I have been working on today.

Where the shelf had been

shelf inside the closet -- it even fit sideways!

I also put some nails in the sides of the closet to hang things

Incidentally this entailed packing up my mom's clothes that have been there since she passed away. It was good for them to go where they can be used again.