Extreme Closet Make Over

Our under-the-stairs closet is a little over three feet wide by ten feet long. Large enough to fit at least two - maybe even three - orphaned wizard children comfortably, or in our case, tons of stuff that had not found a permanent home in the new house yet.

The previous owners' closet organization system, consisting of one lone 38" wire shelf with a rack for hanging things, was pretty poor. Our organization system of cramming our coats onto that rack while stuffing the rest of the closet with unpacked boxes, unhung pictures and a plethora of other homeless items was no better. Last week, I finally had enough of tunneling my way through the junk just to get to my coat and decided it was time for a closet makeover.

I started by pulling everything out which was similar to taking an air mattress out of the box. The stuff that was tightly packed into a fairly small space was now taking up the entire dining room, and just like an air mattress, you know there is no way you are ever getting it all back into that box/closet.

I have no explanation for the number of lampshades.

I pulled the lone shelf down and painted the walls with some light blue paint bought, but not used, for a previous project. Then I put up a Closet Maid organizer I bought at Home Depot on the long wall across from the door. I have two 48" poles going from it to the wall, giving us more than double the room for all of our coats. During this process, I did have to wonder how have people who live in a fairly temperate climate collected so many coats?  For me it is probably a style thing, and I guess Hubby is preparing for his dream cabin in Vermont.

This is where the lonely wire rack hung. Now there is room for photo albums, storage boxes, mail supplies, files and vacuum cleaners.

The shelf with the hooks was another thrift store find that I painted white. It is a great place for the take-the-dog-out coat, my picnic blanket scarf and the all important Georgia Bulldog scarf (both survived the great scarf purge of 2016).

I put up two shelves were the wire shelf had been. In the corner I placed a nice two drawer file cabinet that holds legal size files - very necessary for real estate agents - that I bought at the Durham Rescue Mission Thrift Store. Next to it was room for my two downstairs vacuum cleaners.

You can see in the photo that there are still quite a few unhung pieces of artwork stacked against the wall. That is a project for another day.

Before putting everything back, I purged - again. I was stunned to see some of the useless junk that made it up here from Georgia.  How many winter scarves do two people living in North Carolina need? Certainly not 17! I was able to cull down to nine. The same held true for mittens, wrist braces, entire packages of school photos (I kept about three for each year) and so on.

There was a lot of work, and a good week and a half of stumbling over the out-placed closet dwelling junk, but it was oh so worth it. If you are a person like me who loves nicely organized closets, drawers, cabinets and pantries, you know the feeling of joy I get when I open the door to this closet now.