The Great Closet Purge of 2016

Over the past year, I've been working on downsizing my closet. I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned it here, but my "closet" is actually the third bedroom of our house. The upper floor has our master bedroom (granted our house is only about 1,000 square feet so none of the bedrooms are huge) and a smaller room that was marketed as the third bedroom. There's enough room for a twin sized bed and a dresser. Since B and I don't have anyone to occupy this room, we agreed that I could put my clothes, bookshelves, and desk in there to use the room as my "office". B installed some wire shelving for me when we first moved in (after I painted the walls pink, of course).

About a year ago, the weight of everything I had on the shelves and hanging tore a hole in the drywall. >_<  How embarrassing that I have so much clothing and just CRAP that the shelving gave out and put a hole in the wall!

Since then, I've been slowly slimming down the amount of clothing I have (except for my massive amount of Oiselle...that has grown, if anything). I took the name-brand stuff (American Eagle, Hollister, etc) that was still in great shape and gave it to my two teenage cousins. Some of it I sold on Poshmark. Then the remainder of stuff that didn't go to those two places ended up at Goodwill.

yes, that is a hole in the wall. yes, the walls are pink.

Let's just say there were a LOT of trips to Goodwill in 2015.

I've been reading, in chunks, Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and trying to incorporate her methods into my home and in my approach when bringing anything into the house.

Another area where I've been ruthless is keeping all the extraneous garbage out of the house. I feel like cardboard and extra packaging, etc. tends to pile up because we are always waiting for the recycling pick-up week. Since we don't live very far from the Municipal Yards, I've been making trips there on weeks when we have a couple bags of paper recycling or some boxes that need to go. 

It's amazing how much free space you have once you get rid of things that you haven't worn or no longer enjoy wearing.

In the coming months, we are going to be remodeling parts of the house and I have PLANS for this room!

• get a real dresser (currently using two sets of Rubbermaid drawers)
• re-do the clothing rod situation
• put down real flooring
• get an actual door
• utilize more of the "attic" space

Are you doing any home remodeling?