Closet and guest room cleaning

Since the beginning of the year, we have had several projects around the house. Recently, I have started on some of the more unglamorous tasks of re-organizing (re-orging, as we call it) all of the closets, pantries and other storage areas.

A couple of weeks ago, I tackled the guest room closet. The girls' closet is quite small, but the guest room has a standard, walk-in closet. We keep the in-season clothes in their closet, and out of season and larger sized clothing (expansion clothing, if you will) is categorized by size in the guest closet. To really appreciate the challenge with the "expansion clothing," the clothes for future sizes/years, I should explain that I purchase a LOT of clothing from clearance sales and on eBay... things that may not be worn for a couple of years. Lastly (but by no means least), we are the recipient of some very generous hand-me-down clothing from an older cousin, Riley. There are a LOT of clothes in that closet.

Oh, and my old suits from a previous job are in there, as well as some stored clothing of Skip's.

The closet could withstand all of those clothes because that's what closets are designed to handle. What really derailed the guest closet is that we used it as storage for everything that might be damaged by extreme heat/cold in the attic alcoves. I failed to capture a "before" image. To give you an idea of the state of this closet, we had not seen the floor -- much less have we been able to walk inside the closet -- since about six months after we moved in. There were three large lamps on the floor. We had stored several pieces of framed pics in there. All of our extra comforters, pillows and blankets were stored in there. All of the DVD cases for the girls' Baby Einstein and Elmo collection were stored in boxes (otherwise the cases are systematically destroyed). I had three boxes of birthday decorations from the girls' first three parties. Finally, the closet also serves as the place where I stash gifts that I pick up throughout the year.

It was not pretty.

Do you remember the episode from "Friends" where Chandler moves in with Monica? At the end of the episode, he finds the junk closet? It wasn't quite that bad, but close.

First, before the cleaning commenced, the girls wanted to get out of dodge. They were rescued by their grandparents:



Next, to reclaim this area, I removed practically every item from the closet and identified it as 1) a keeper, 2) a candidate for donation or 3) trash. We donated approximately 35% of the inventory. Another 15% was trashed. The rest was re-orged. The process took approximately 8 hours, over the course of two days.

Look! The guest room floor is carpeted? Wait, do we need an outlet cover? Who knew?



I was not sure the guest room would ever be clean again. To really make it sparkle, I changed out the comforter for summer:



I can finally tolerate walking into this room again. In fact, I like this room again. The remaining amount of clutter in the closet prevents me from "loving" the room, but I definitely like it.