Clearing a Cluttered Closet and Organizing with Son-Made Shelves

I think I’m becoming the typical blogger.  Having done this only two months, I think I’m learning the ropes and know I’m really enjoying it.  I love the accountability!  I’ve gotten a lot accomplished in preparation for various posts.  I have several recipe, crafty items, and other interesting posts set aside for later.  However, the organizing posts…these are hard to come by!  I have to work all week to get the job done so I can post the following Friday and keep up with Org Junkie’s 52 weeks of organization.  My husband assures me that I am the most organized person he knows so I’m beginning to wonder about the people he knows because each week I have been successful in showing you some unorganized disaster area in my house.  Hmmmm, makes me think.

Anyhoooo, this week I worked on the closet in my dining room.  Keep in mind this is an almost 100 year old home and there are 2 real (unmade by us) closets in this house and one of them is in the dining room.  Go figure!!  It has been a coat, music, instrument, game, small appliance, and anything else we could fit in it closet and as you can see, needed DESPERATE attention.

So, I pulled everything out.  One of my kids came in the dining room and asked…”How did all of that fit in that little closet?”  It’s must have been my amazing organization huh?

I was able to get rid of a garbage bag of coats, took my music to another bookshelf, organized my games down in the family room, and threw away any junk that had just been stuffed in there.

Then I got this brilliant plan to get my son busy on building me some shelves for this closet…why oh why didn’t I do this YEARS ago??!!  My 14 year old really likes wood working and is learning so much from his father.  I was really proud of his work on these shelves.

 

Then I got my little princess to work on painting the inside of the closet.  She LOVES to paint and hasn’t mastered the art of neat painting so I thought this was the job for her.  She enjoyed every minute of it!

 

So after two days…yes, it took two days to complete this task, everything that was going back in this closet was back in and I couldn’t be more pleased!  

This is to the left of my new shelves.  That’s where I have all our coats stored for winter

 

I really think I’m going to be contracting my son out a little more for his wood working abilities. (Maybe not…Just a side note…my son fell last night and broke his ankle…he will be out of commission for 8 weeks 🙁 ) He used all scrap wood and so the only cost for the shelves was that of the screws, nails, and of course the paint that we already had on hand.