Entries Tagged as 'Closet'

Deciding what to keep

April 3rd, 2008 11 Comments

Dear Home Ec 101,

I need a strong person to help me resolve to get rid of old shoes, belts, purses and scarves, even though I don’t use any of them. Some of the scarves and bags are really nice ones (if a little bit old lady-ish) inherited from my m-i-l. Some I bought in England and have happy memories attached. Some are Euro comfort shoes from when I had plantar fasciitis from running on pavement. They weren’t cheap, and what if I develop it again?

See my problem? What can I do to get my closet back?

Signed,

Stumped

Ivy says:

That can be hard to decide sometimes. I think you have to ask yourself questions when you’re determining whether to keep stuff or not. I have 3 main questions:

1. Does it have to be stored in my closet?

Often you can store things you might need later, or only once or twice a year, somewhere else. But your closet may be the best place. It’s just something you need to consider. If it would be better stored in the garage, basement, or attic, put it there.

2. Is it something I have some kind of emotional attachment to?

This one you have to be really careful with because you could probably form an emotional attachment with just about everything in your closet. I try to keep 5 items of emotional attachment or less in my closet. I have stuff like my high school letterman’s jacket and my grandma’s awesome purple dress that I’ll never fit into again, but love like crazy. Just keep a set amount of what you can keep depending on your closet size and you’ll be fine.

3. Which is worse, this item taking up space in my closet or the idea of never seeing it again?

It’s interesting, the same thing this year that you can’t bear to part with you may have no trouble at all getting rid of next year. I keep a box that are questionable items. Sometimes when I get really froggy I’ll toss the box out entirely without even looking in there. I’ve never lost anything that I truly regretted.

My Aunt Marjorie always said she only wanted to own enough stuff that she could put it all in a suitcase and just pick up and go whenever she wanted to. She consequently had one of the most uncluttered houses ever. Naturally, she owned more than a suitcase full of items, but thinking of that kept her uncluttery. I try to think of that, too.

Submit your household questions to helpme@home-ec101.com

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Avoiding the shoe drama: cubes to clean that messy closet

March 10th, 2008 5 Comments

retrochick.JPGIvy says:

Every single morning there is drama in my household. See, we keep our shoes in the hall closet but apparently the closet monster comes to my house every night and either mixes the shoes up and makes them hard to find, or if we’re really lucky the shoe monster comes and hides the shoes in various hard-to-find places throughout my house. It’s a load of fun searching for shoes at 6 AM when you need to leave at 5:59 AM.

I’ve been saying for years that I need to do something about the shoe closet, and I have done a lot of things like make everyone only keep one pair of shoes in the closet (that worked for about 5 minutes) and make people line their shoes up at the door the night before. (works great, if you remember to do it, and I don’t.)

What I’ve always wanted to do was get a shoe rack, but I really didn’t want to spend a bundle on one. I kept an eye out at thrift stores, but never found one. Finally, at the new Super Target grand opening in my town this weekend, I saw shoe cubes for $11. So now my closet is a bastion of organization:

shoe-closet.jpg

I checked Target’s ad to see if the shoe cube sale is just for the new store or if it’s for everyone, and the ad says $12.99. So, not as cheap as in the grand opening store* but still a good price. Happy organizing!
*Unless you’re in Smyrna, TN. If you are, check out the $11 storage cubes before I come in and buy the rest of them- I have ideas, muahaha

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Spare sheet storage

November 6th, 2007 7 Comments

retrochick.JPGIvy says:

My husband usually does the laundry in my household. However, that wasn’t working out for us, and since he had surgery last month, I’ve been taking over the laundry responsibilities. I’ve learned many amusing things while doing the laundry, but the overwhelming thing I have learned is just the fact that we have too much clothing, too many towels, too many sheet sets.

I was talking to Heather about this in IM this morning. I was telling her that I needed to clean my linen closet out so I could start storing towels in there. Previously I had been storing blankets, tablecloths, and sheet sets in there, but with the overabundance of towels I have unearthed since the Great Laundry Rescue of 2007, I need to make space for them in the linen closet.

Heather said all you really need is 2 sheet sets per bed. I probably *do* only have 2 sheet sets per bed, but with 4 beds in the house, that still takes up some space in my linen closet. Heather then said something that, to me, is such complete genius I knew I had to share it with you guys:

Store the extra sheets under the mattress.

Seriously, I would have never thought of that in a million, billion years.  And it makes so much sense, why take up space in the linen closet when you can just put the sheets under the mattress? Not only that, but for those middle of the night, “I wet my bed” incidents, you can just reach under the mattress for a full, clean set of sheets, ready to go, no digging through the linen closet.

Genius, I tell ya. Genius.

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Declutter the closets while getting dressed

October 31st, 2007 15 Comments

WinkIvy says:

Every once in awhile you come up with an idea that is so simple, you wonder why you didn’t think of it before.  I was trying on outfits and hating most of them. The shirts were too short, the pants caused camel toe, nothing was right. And then I thought, “Why in the world am I hanging onto pants that cause camel toe? Is it really ever going to get better? No. I need to get rid of those pants.”

Then it occurred to me that I need a box in my closet for clothes I try on and hate. The fastest and easiest way to declutter is to do it while you go on about your everyday life. Life’s too short to have to sort through a closet full of clothing you hate. So put a box in your closet for clothes you really don’t like. Eventually, the box will fill up and you can Freecycle it!

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Tis the season to clean your closets

October 28th, 2007 2 Comments

retrochick.JPGIvy says:

Since the weather is finally changing from hot to cold, now’s a good time to go through all your kids’ clothing and get rid of the stuff that doesn’t fit or just generally looks like crap. I use two methods to do this: at the source (drawers and closets) and during laundry time.

First, I go through the entire house and look under beds, dressers, and all the other places tiny little clothes like to hide. I have no idea why clothes like to hide so much under dressers, but they sure do in my house. I suspect my kids are trying something on, hating it, and then kicking the clothing item under the dresser. I’ve never been known to do that myself, no, never. ;)

I have 2 boxes in my laundry room. One is marked “consignment” and the other is marked “goodwill”, even though I have generally stopped giving to Goodwill and have started giving things away on Freecycle instead. Clothing that is too small, but looks practically new and is a good brand goes to the consignment store. Clothing that doesn’t look horrible, but doesn’t look practically new, or is an off-brand goes to Freecycle. Anything that looks horrible goes into my rag bag.

Once the laundry is finished (is laundry ever really finished? I don’t think so) I go into the closets and dressers and take a look. All the summer clothes are moved to either the top dresser drawer or the outskirts of the closet. I check the tags and take a look at each item. Clothing that is the smaller size my kids can still fit into goes either to the consignment or goodwill box. Larger size clothing stays.

Then I go through the winter clothing, making notes of what is needed, so I can go to the consignment store and buy more clothing for winter. Since my kids have such vast age differences, very little clothing is able to be passed between them, but anything that might stand the test of time is packed and placed into boxes in the attic with the size written on the box. Since I don’t have a lot of clothing that can be passed down, I generally use shoeboxes for this purpose.

Since I’m busy cleaning for all the guests that are coming, now is a good time to do this chore.

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