Deal with all those clothes

I still have a long way to go, but this weekend’s marathon has me feeling optimistic.

Edit 3/1 – And to ice the cake – big bag of shoes went to Sally’s on the weekend, and huge bag of clothes to the girls at work today.

While M was here, we spent a morning going through clothes racks and making outfits. They look pretty good, although I seemed obsesssed with making summer outfits and we are going into fall. I gave her a few items and added a few others to the “get rid of” section.

Left to my own devices I could never come up with a decent outfit, despite having all the components. I have no fashion sense at all.

The other week, when he helped me get things organized throughout most of the house, the room I’d designated to eventually become a walk-in closet/laundry room was pretty jammed up. (understatement.)

I already had everything needed for the job – studfinder, screwdriver drill, super-long poles (one was a scavenged old bannister – flimsy for a bannister but great for a clothes pole) and brackets. What was lacking was (at first) my inability to settle on the best place to locate the poles, (later) my lack of confidence to commit and actually cut a pole to a specific size, (and finally) my physical inability to get anywhere near a wall!

He told me to pile all the random unhung clothes, drapes, linens etc. onto the guest bed. A very heavy, very high pile! Plus, a couple of the big bureaus that did not belong in the bedroom were moved into this room, and some smaller ones were moved to the attic (sans content).

Next, he pulled out chairs, coatracks, boxes, drawers of the already moved bureaus, and other misc. space-eating items for me to carry to the attic. Then he moved the entire heaped-up bedful of clothes aside and installed the poles. Level, sturdy, one above the other across an entire wall.

I went through the entire heap on the bed. Drapes, fabric, went upstairs into some of those drawers. Clothes went onto hangers and up on the poles. T-shirts and sweaters went in laundry baskets to my room (a different project). By the end, 4 or 5 hours later, another rack had been removed from the room, there were no random items laying about, and the room was roughed into just a few basic elements:

A wall with double layer clothes poles.

A wall with guest bed centered between two big windows.
Below one window, toward the clothes rack wall, a step stool.
Below the other window, one pretty chair.

The third wall (door and plumbing pipes wall) gets washer and dryer eventually, but for now there is a shelving unit with boots.

The fourth wall has a large mirror. To the left is a nook with shoe shelves and dressers; to the right, “the closet” which will be reconfigured to be a more useful space in the future, and will probably swallow many of the contents of “the nook”.

The middle of the floor is open, with a little rug. You can walk there!

I am encouraging him to start a business doing this. He really rocks! There must be plenty of people like me who just can’t make their living spaces manageable.

Anyway, now I know how much stuff I can realistically store in this room – a lot, but not an infinite amount. It’s great, because I can now try on outfits and go through the (still too many) clothes I own without strewing them all over the house.

This all happened a few days ago but I’ve been in shock.

I have a lot of clothes and none of them are put away. Some need to go to the cleaners, some need to be gotten rid of, some just need to be put away. Of course there’s a little laundry, too, but that’s fairly up to date. I really need to put them away well enough so that I can get to the underlying problem – making some better storage.

I’ve got some of the storage-making stuff already. Just need to be able to see past the clothes, linens, etc. so I can complete the plan, get the rest of the materials, and build the storage.