Dan and I recently saw the movie, Blended, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Now before you get all judgy, hear me out. The movie was stupid-funny, and I was surprised at some of the poignant moments too. It won’t be a box office record-breaker, but it was an entertaining summer flick. In the movie, Drew Barrymore’s character, Lauren, owns a closet organization company called Closet Queens. The name is the butt of a few jokes, and it bewilders Sandler’s character, Jim, about how anyone would pay to have their closets organized. While I would never pay anyone to do mine, I found myself doing quite a bit of organizing this week. I realized, humbly of course, that I am a closet queen too.
The feeling of immense satisfaction that comes from pulling everything out of a closet and reorganizing from scratch is addicting. Once I get started, there is no telling how many closets will bow down to my anal-retentive, bin-labeling ways. We have a moderate-sized walk-in storage closet in our basement. It is about eight by eight feet, with shelves on all sides. In the past six months, Dan and I have haphazardly stuffed every “I’ll deal with this later” item into its once roomy crannies, leaving a square foot space to walk in when you need to heave your next load of randomness. Christmas wreathes spewed their little red beads over an open tool box while a broken oscillating fan blocks the drawers containing the extra light bulbs. Wrapping paper and tissue paper exploded out of a once organized bin. And let’s not forget the bowling ball, tennis balls, deflated basketball, and bocce balls. Too many balls. I think I’ve painted a pretty good picture; the closet was a not-hot mess.
What exacerbated the closet’s demise was the basement itself. The basement was (notice the past-tense here, foreshadowing a happy ending) a gloomy, gold-fixtured, hodge-podge of leftover college furniture. I did not take pride in the basement, so it was natural I would let its companion, said basement storage closet, assume a similar, less-glamorous identity.
That all changed when Sunday afternoon tickled Dan’s fancy to be a he-man and saw some wood. I love when he gets on these kicks, because the end result is always a reason for me to go shopping. He didn’t fail me this time. A few hours into his project, I wandered down to see how the sawing was going, only to find a fully constructed bench with cubbies underneath gracing the space that once held a beat-up built in desk the former owners installed. I was delighted. I could sense his focus wasn’t waning either–he said he wanted to buy paint and tackle the walls while he was at it. Score! At three in the morning, just 14 hours after his sawing began, my handy husband had completed a coat of paint on the entire basement and painted his bench creation. What was once an eye sore beneath us was coming up roses!
This basement transformation has continued this week to include rearranging furniture, installing new blinds and light fixtures, mounting the TV, buying new couch pillows, and installing new hardware on the built-ins to replace the gold. The fixes are all inexpensive, but the result is dramatic. I feel like I have my very own HGTV transformation. If you have a room in your house that feels outdated, don’t underestimate the power of paint. I sound like a TV host, sorry, but it really is true.
All this painting and refreshing led me to the closet. It was now the weakest link. I bought some bins at Target and got to work at 6:09 pm on Tuesday night. I took every single bin, box, and ball out. I took everything out of every bin and box. Then I sorted: Goodwill pile, garbage pile, move to garage pile, sell pile, and keep pile. The extra bins were key, because they forced me to reorganize versus just taking everything out and putting it back in a little neater than it was before. At 9:46 pm, I was pushing the last piece of tape onto the index-card labeled bin. In the time it took me, I did get distracted a few times in the “Dan and Melissa memory box,” but that is part of the fun of reorganizing.
A solution to keep chaos at bay, at least for me, is to keep index cards, tape, and a Sharpie in the closet for future labeling needs. And I left one shelf completely empty, anticipating Baby Pepper will have some stuff to fill it. That’s the secret, to finish with more space than you had before.
I can’t believe I just wrote an entire post about organizing, well actually I can. I love to do it, and my next project will be our clothes closet in our bedroom. Maybe when I’m done I’ll start my own closet organizing business, called Closet Pep Talks. Just kidding. Okay, so I should work on the name.
peptalk 