The Year of Organization: Our Bedroom Closet

This week's cleaning/organizing project was our bedroom closet. At last it's at least it's started! It's not completely done, but I spent an hour and 10 minutes working on just the hanging clothes part of the closet. For not having a lot of clothes, my husband and I sure had a lot of clothes stuffed in there! When I say we don't have a lot of clothes, I guess it should be clarified to "we don't have a lot of clothes we actually wear." 

 After close inspection of the before and after pictures it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of difference, but to me there is. 

Here is the before picture. The top shelf and the shoe area should be almost the same in the before and after, as I didn't do anything with those areas.The part of the closet that was driving me the most nuts was all the hanging clothes jam packed in there -- there's about 4 more feet on the right side that you can't see. There were so many old things in there that no longer fit; or were horribly worn that they were crowding out and wrinkling all the freshly ironed clothes hanging in there. It was downright irritating to weed through the unwearable clothes to try and find something I could wear.

Here's the Interim After picture. Most of my cleaning and purging was done on the interior 4 foot section that you can't see in this photo. Which by the way is REALLY hard to get to closet space, which is why most everything we don't routinely wear gets shoved back in there. I confess, when I first set the timer for 1hr, my plan was to work as quickly as possible, but for the first couple of minutes I just looked at the closet wondering where on earth to start and feeling like it was too overwhelming.  Then I thought, well, the timer is set; I'll just try to do at something for that time, plus I promised you all I would write about a project this week. Something about the accountability helps motivate me.

Last week's project was cleaning out and organizing what was left of our junk drawer. Let me tell you--- it has been absolutely WONDERFUL to have a neatly organized "junk" drawer. Twice this week I needed to quickly find something in there and it was so easy!! Just today my husband commented how nice it was that he could readily see if we had a certain size battery. I think he is thrilled I'm doing these organizing projects (I spilled the beans when he wanted to know why on earth I was photographing our closet: ).

Don't forget to visit Org Junkie for the official 52 Weeks of Organizing to get inspired to straighten up your little corner of the world.