closet clean-up, phase two

Guess what arrived yesterday?

Hangers! Beautiful, wood hangers! Who knew this would make me so excited?

(Oh, and the big cardboard box made the little people around here happy.)

I have slowly been working on sorting through the photos, papers, and other memories that also get stored in our closet. Again, I don't think I'm much of a packrat (if you have to keep saying it, does it mean you really are??) but I did come across crazy things in those boxes like cards from Dylan's baby showers and stacks and stacks of duplicate photos.

I ended up keeping four boxes - one of special photos for Dylan, one for Ella, one for Mady (which are now stored in each of their closets) and one for Matt and my assorted memories (extra engagement photos, Matt's high school photos, etc.) I am a scrapbooker so there wasn't a big need for me to hold onto a lot of this stuff since it's already in a scrapbook somewhere.

 

(Sorry folks, those awesome shots of Matt and I in our fall sweaters circa 2002 are long gone now.)

Matt got into the spirit of things and went through his closet as well. His giveaway pile:

Another shot of my closet before (our closets are separate but have exactly the same layout, just on opposite sides):

A couple bags of trash, a couple items relocated to the basement, and here is the finished product:

 

I added some polka dot bins from Target, reused the photo boxes from other spots in my house and obviously invested in the new hangers (I did end up getting the hangers on sale for about 60 cents a piece which is less than the $1 or so they would usually run you). We cut the number of hangers in our house almost in half and I'm hoping this will help us stay on track in the future - if we run out of hangers it means we have too many clothes.

As an added bonus the smaller white boxes the hangers came in have already been re-purposed to hold the kid's professional photos (that's an organizational project for another day) and all of our baby books and calendars (yes, I am that mom). The boxes line up nicely along the bottom side cubby in each of our closets. I love it when it all comes together.

I also have plenty of room for my high school and college memorabilia (one box each), our wedding albums, and a large square box for each kid to save special artwork, papers, etc. PLUS, there is still empty space...I could store more things in here eventually or just enjoy my uncluttered shelves.

And Matt's de-cluttered closet:

I don't know about you but waking up to a clutter-free closet starts my day off on the right foot. I don't spend a lot of time in my room during the day but it is still important to me that it's picked up and looks nice (until a year or two ago I was not a bed maker and now I do it almost religiously every morning as soon as I get up along with opening all of the blinds).

Next up: kids' craft supply storage. This drives me bonkers in our house because we don't have a good system which makes clean-up hard. Hoping to find something kid-friendly and inexpensive and a system that will transfer well to the basement when we eventually finish that space. Wish me luck!

[Note: My cousin Kristin posted her closet re-do here.]