By Manda
We've lived in our home for a little under 5 years. We don't own it, and so there are a lot of things about it that drive me crazy that I can't really do anything about. Lately the thing that's making me nuts in life is CLUTTER. I have two children (almost 4 and 20 months old), a boy and a girl, and so we have a LOT of old baby clothes and baby stuff and toys and STUFF. It gets overwhelming quickly. Over the last few months we've made some changes, one of which was to move our son's crib into his sister's bedroom and turn his room into a playroom/spare room with a twin bed for guests. When we first made that move I cleaned out and donated a TON of stuff. We had a huge yard sale and anything we didn't sell went into my husband's pickup truck and immediately to Goodwill.
Man, did THAT feel good! But I'm not anywhere close to done.
One area of our house that has always bugged me is the closet in our childrens' bedroom. Our house was built in the 50's, and in my opinion, this was NOT a particularly creative time in homebuilding (don't even get me started on how inefficient my kitchen space is). Case in point: the closet in this room has these crazy sliding doors that make only one half of the closet accessible at one time. Somewhere along the line these doors were probably removed for painting and then one of them was re-hung upside down, which means the closet was also EXTREMELY difficult to open and close. Huge pain in the butt. Since it takes up one entire wall in the room, we just had a lot of random crap in there and the dresser/changing table shoved in front of it.
Initially my plan was to take the closet doors off and make the space into a cool little nook for the kids to "hang out" in. But when I got into the project I stopped myself ... the kids have an ENTIRE playroom to play in! And a stroke of genius hit me: put the dresser IN the closet and leave the doors off!
Before, during, and after!
I love it! It frees up so much more space in the kids' room and makes so much more sense storage-wise. And what did I do with all the random crap in the closet? Only Goodwill knows. :)
How do you declutter and streamline your house?
(Photos from: me)
Both my kids have hand me down dressers in their closet. It's way cheaper than some fancy organizational system. We left the doors on but they're bifold doors so access isn't such an issue.
Posted by: Kate | July 13, 2012 at 08:41 PM