Cleaning Out My Closet
An ode to the Eminem song, yes. I couldn’t help it. It was a perfect title. As heartfelt and deep as I would love to create another post, this one is just brass tacks. I never was a believer in Spring Cleaning. I just figured if you cleaned your home regularly then what would it matter that it was Spring? It wasn’t until after I had cleared my closet and dragged bags, boxes and miscellaneous shoe organizers to the dumpster did I look around and see mattresses, a TV stand and storage containers and realized…. this was Spring cleaning! Apparently I wasn’t the only one with the idea. The weather was warm and the day sunny, perfect for the first weekend of Spring. Why on earth I was compelled to stay indoors and tackle the monstrosity that was my closet, I will never know. Maybe it was in the air, but really I had this idea for a while and had finally found and purchased what I needed. I was very excited to finally get my closet in order. When I first moved into my apartment I had a bit of a dilemma. Do I take the bigger room with what might as well have been a broom closet or the smaller room with a closet double the size of the first one? Knowing how much crap I own, the choice was an easy one. I obviously opted for the larger closet but soon realized that I needed something much bigger. I could barely fit all of my things and kept trying to find different ways to rearrange and re-organize everything but it all just wouldn’t fit neatly. I attempted to get rid of items twice before, but my compulsive shopping quickly fixed that. I started to feel overwhelmed. Why do I have so much stuff? I don’t even go anywhere anymore!! For all it was worth, I probably just needed my scrubs, a couple leggings and a hoodie this year. I searched Pinterest for organization ideas, for closet inspiration, for some hope!
The Process
Originally I had all of my shoes in a shoe cubby that sat in the middle of the closet and I had clothes piled on top as well as a three drawer dresser, a smaller three draw dresser, a second shoe cubby, clothes hanging and more shoes on a top shelf. Yeesh just typing all that sounds like a lot. I have a shopping problem, clearly. I wouldn’t even be able to follow Marie Kando’s beloved concept… “if it doesn’t spark joy, throw it away". All of it will make me happy…. if given the chance to wear it! I am definitely not one to keep clothes that are too small or too big for me as I fluctuate in weight through life. Everything in my closet can literally be worn today, it all fits. So how do I go about downsizing my stuff and organizing the rest?
I basically just decided to empty my closet completely. I went through each and every item and thought… “When the hell was the last time I even wore this?” If it has been over a year and it isn’t some kind of special occasion clothing, I chucked it. I would say this process helped me eliminate about a quarter of my wardrobe and sadly it didn’t seem like it made much of a dent. I’m really good at keeping things in great condition so I have the ability to hold on to items for far too long but the good thing about that is that they are still able to be given away! I like to donate my clothes to local charities. Since I am cheap and don’t buy expensive name brand clothing there is no point in trying to resell my things. I’m not sure how much my four seasons ago, Target brand jeans will go for in this economy. There are so many local places you can drop your clothes off for charity. You do have to be careful as some places will sell your items but the profits aren’t always used appropriately. Always do a little research before ever contributing to a charity.
CHARITIES TO DONATE CLOTHES TO
I would also check out your local shelters as well
Once my give-away clothes were packed and out of the way, it was time to focus on reorganizing the giant pile of mess I had created. I was actually a little excited for this part. It took me a couple of months to find exactly what I was looking for. Either I was searching for the wrong things or maybe just in the wrong places but I had a vision that nothing seemed to satisfy. I almost gave up on my vision until I decided to check out Amazon. My best friend!! How come I didn’t think of checking there before? So I did a quick search for closet organization. I scrolled through a bunch of different custom shelves and different types of hangers until I came across this
This thing was a God send. It was exactly what I needed and was looking for. I needed something that was capable of separating and organizing everything, that held a lot but also was conveniently sized. The genius of this is that you can customize it for your needs. You can expand it by adding more cubes, you could build it to a particular shape you need, and you can make it smaller if that’s what your space calls for. The kicker was also that it was cheap!! Everything else I had looked at for my closet was going to cost me more than I would rather have wanted to spend and none of it was exactly what I was looking for. As soon as I saw this it was straight to cart! The awesome thing about this as well is that you could leave it as just cubbies or you could buy collapsible cubes that you could use as drawers like I did.
The cubbies hold a standard sized cube/drawer which is great because you didn’t have to buy any particular size and could go anywhere from Amazon to Walmart to find the right color or design.
The setup was fairly easy as far as building the storage unit. It came with a little wooden mallet which I thought was cute. I didn’t end up using it because it was pretty easy to snap the dividers in by hand. I would say that I probably should have used it though because I didn’t snap a couple of the dividers in correctly and the storage unit ended up leaning over at one point. You can see my reaction in real time on the Youtube video I made to accompany this post. It didn’t take too long for me to put all of the pieces I needed together. I apparently ordered the 12 cubby unit when I thought I had purchased the 9 but it worked out because the 9 cubbies would not have been enough. For some reason though I only ordered 6 of the collapsible boxes and will be ordering more.
With the new storage unit in place, I was able to reorganize some of the dresser units I already had and hung up all of the clothes again. Overall it took me about two solid hours to get all of it done. It didn’t turn out exactly how I had wanted it to, but I am definitely happy with the results and my overwhelming anxiety, every time I had to open my closet, has subsided.