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I have another cleaning, organizing, purging project completed! Since yesterday was a holiday, I decided to take it easy and relax in the morning. I slept for a bit, but just hung around, scrolled through Instagram, finished a podcast I started (Murder in Apt. 12), started a new podcast (Serial Season 4), then went to Sonic for lunch around 11:30. Although I’m not really into a “Get things done” a kind of mood after we finished lunch, I knew I couldn’t go through the day without work. But I also didn’t want to work in my studio. What I really wanted to do was organize my other room in the bedroom – the room where I hold my clothes.
Two weeks ago, I tackled the other room. I turned an underused closet into my shoe closet and I absolutely loved having that organized closet and not having my shoes piled up on the floor. Now I am careful to put my shoes away every time I take them off. As I’ve said many times before, I’m not a neat and organized person by nature, but once I have an organizational system, I’m pretty good at using it.
So now that my shoes are out of the way, I have to tackle my wardrobe. Since we moved into this bedroom, I’ve only had a 40-inch hanging bar for clothes. Imagine that. There’s no way I can fit all of my clothes on one 40-inch hanging bar, so some of my clothes are in the bedroom closet, the rest are folded or hanging in the sunroom (where the washer and dryer are), and other clothes are draped over the desk in the bedroom.
So yesterday morning, before I decided to tackle this project, my room looked like this.
I have a top shelf that I never use because I made it too deep to be practical. I have a 40-inch hanging bar of mostly shirts, but about four or five lucky pairs of pants and jeans. And I have a four-tiered shoe rack downstairs that is now empty two weeks ago when I converted the other room into my shoe closet.
Since there wasn’t much hanging space in the closet, it led to this mess on the desk between the shelves. Most of my pants lived here. After the laundry was done, they started on a nice, neatly folded stack. But over time, that nice stack turned into this messy pile because I had to figure out what to wear every day.
Naturally, I live with this system, so yesterday afternoon, I emptied this room and removed the shelf so I could start with an empty box.
Then I went to Lowe’s and bought everything I needed from their Closetmaid closet organization line, including rails, brackets, three shelves, two pairs of clothes rod holders, and two rods. Since I was screwing the rails into the plywood, this was quick and easy. There are two rails installed here, but I need three rails, one in the middle. So they are about 20 inches apart.
Then the brackets (which slide into the slotted rails very easily), and the shelves went up. And then the rod hangers attach very easily to the shelves and the rods are rod hangers. The whole system is very quick and easy. And then I got to the fun part – loading all my clothes and organizing everything.
Since we are heading into summer, I put all my sweaters on the top two shelves…
On the top hanging bar, I hung all my pants and jeans. I think I need another bar support in the middle as that bar seems to bend a bit under the weight.
I got into this whole organizing thing, I bought some hang tags that say “cropped” and “long” so I can keep my pants and jeans organized by length.
In hindsight, I wish I had bought colorful tags so they would look better. And I can’t believe I didn’t think to use my label maker instead of writing on the tags by hand! I have extras, so I’ll probably make new ones using my label maker.
Here is another side where you can see my “tall” tag. The tag in the middle reads “Cut” on one side and “Long” on the other. And of course, “tall” is relative since I’m only five feet tall.
Then I put the bottoms of shirts and tops. Shirts take up more space from front to back than pants and jeans so I decided to put pants on top and shirts on the bottom, so with the shirts on the top bar, I have to look under the shirts and a bit back. . Look at the pants. This way, everything is easy to see.
Now, not only is my little room a very efficient workhorse for me, but my desk is back too!! I am very excited about this. I love to sit here and read and I haven’t been able to do that in a long time. I used to sit here every night and read Matt out loud, so hopefully we can start that again.
So that’s how I spent my holiday and once again, I’m very excited to complete another company project! Every time I do an enterprise project, it’s like a weight is lifted off my shoulders. And now it’s great to have two very efficiently organized closets in this room. Although I have added two more shelves to the shoe closet since I took the picture below, see both of them here, so I really should have taken a new picture.
That being said, I only have five dresses and zero skirts. For now, and as long as we’re in this bedroom, those dresses need to stay in the sunroom. It’s okay though. I can’t even remember the last time I got dressed. I want to buy more dresses and skirts and actually wear dresses and skirts more often, but I need to get further along in my health journey before that happens. I don’t like how dresses and skirts look on me right now, but that might change in a few months!
Addicted 2 Decorating shares my DIY and decorating journey as I renovate and decorate the 1948 Fixer Upper that my husband, Matt, and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and is unable to do physical activity, so I do most of the housework myself. You can learn more about me here.