31 Days of Autumn Nesting: Day 15 - Skeletons In My Closet

I was a little embarrassed to show you what my exercise room looked like yesterday but I figured my readers would have one of two reactions. Either you’d look at it and think, “Yay! I’m not the only one” and feel better about yourself. Or “I’d never let a room get like that” and again, feel better about yourself. So in a way, I’m just helping to improve everyone’s self esteem, right?

I was so proud of my accomplishment yesterday. I kept taking a peek at the room and of course, when David got home I had to show it off to him. He was really impressed, especially in light of the fact we still have all the “stuff”. I reminded him that having grown up with a very tiny bedroom (but at least I didn’t have to share it!) and a lot of stuff provided me with excellent “stuff and cram” skills.

So now I’m on a roll. Today I took on our storage closet. It’s hard to tell from the pictures but it’s huge (15 feet deep by 4 feet wide) with shelves to the ceiling along one side and across the back. It’s great to have so much storage space — as long as it’s kept organized. Starting back during Happyland Music Fest, it started to be a dumping ground, just like the exercise room. Are you noticing a theme here? A thorough clean out and organizing project would take at least two days. I’ve done it before so I know that’s no exaggeration. I don’t have that sort of time right now so I decided to just neaten it up a bit.

I started by setting a timer for 20 minutes. Here’s what it looked like to start:

Nice, huh? I began by pulling out the empty boxes and the stuff on the floor down the middle:

Yes, that’s Shiloh’s back end. We usually keep boxes from small appliances and such for awhile, just in case we need to return them. It’s time to get rid of them, though.

I didn’t sort through anything but basically just straightened stuff up. It’s nowhere near where I’d like it but at least there’s a clear path down the center:

A lot of stuff has been returned to its place on the shelves:

At least there's a path down the center.

David made and installed these hooks for me a few years ago. It is SO handy to places to hang things that are otherwise awkward to store. Plus it makes use of all that wall space:

This is what I removed. The boxes have all been broken down now and are ready to be recycled. Unfortunately we can’t recycle styrofoam so those packing pieces will have to go in the trash but the rest is in the back of my car, ready to drop off at the recycling center. Oh, and that 20 minutes on the timer thing? That was no where near enough time. All told, it was closer to an hour, including vacuuming and hauling all the recycling to the car.

Empty boxes and such - headed for recycling.

Sometime this winter, probably after the holidays, I’d like to thoroughly clean and organize this closet. A number of years ago I bought a whole bunch of white cardboard boxes, numbered each one and then grouped like items in each. I then wrote the contents of each box on an index card with a corresponding number and filed them in a small file box. This was such a terrific idea because instead of searching through all the boxes to find something, I could just look through the cards and find out which box it was in. After Lisa got married I got rid of a LOT of boxes of homeschool curriculum and a bunch of other stuff from this closet. That sort of messed up my system because it removed certain boxes and they are no longer in order. I really need to get rid of a bunch more stuff out of this closet and then re-do the boxes and corresponding cards. After Christmas…

31 Days of Autumn Nesting: Day 15 – Skeletons In My Closet

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