sarahmichelef

relentlesstoil suggests a "hap-den".

I spent an hour and a half-ish in the sewing room trying to unearth it from the pile of junk that was threatening to take over. When we went to excavate the textile guild's fabric stash on Tuesday I realized that most of what was blocking access to the stuff that I NEED access to in the closet was baby stuff - it had become the dumping ground for books and toys that TRex is too old for or that drove us insane.

So out came everything from the closet. An abridged inventory:

baby swing
bouncy seat
2 pink parkas, size 12 months (one still with tags on)
baby quilt (matches crib bedding)
2 boxes worth of toys & books
1 paper grocery bag of stuffed animals
1 carpet remnant roughly 8'x6'
1 cheezeball extra-girly outfit, never worn, size 12 months
2 infant-sized bathrobes
numerous pairs of plastic training pants (worn over swim diapers in the pool)
a lot of broken-down baby wipe boxes

The carpet remnant is now in the crawlspace in our room (we store lots of stuff in there and call it "insulation") and the baby stuff is out waiting for some folks we know to come and paw through it for their little-one-in-gestation.

The major issue with the closet is that it's hard to turn into a really useable space, especially for the amount of stuff I need to store in there. It's about 5' square with the door right in one corner. However, it's under the eaves so the hanging bar is only about 4' off the ground. There is a shelf above the bar, but it's only about 8" deep and fits back into the roofline so you have at MOST 6 or so inches of vertical space on it. Which ultimately means that all of our SCA clothes are on a hanging rack elsewhere in the room and that there are tons of boxes and bags just shoved willy-nilly into the closet.

But with the kid-stuff out of that closet, there's a lot more free space. Enough more free space that I can put up two or maybe even three deep shelves along the back wall (opposite the door, perpendicular to the existing hanging rod). Those shelves will be able to hold all the lighter stuff and there will still be floor space for all of the bins of fabric, the textile guild machine and serger, etc.

So now that's on the family list of house-projects. It's low priority (many other things to finish first) but it will happen eventually. In the meantime, I have gotten all of my fabric and all of the textile guild's fabric into the closet (including the under-bed bins of yardage, which had previously been out). In fact, all of the things in the closet are meant to be in the closet. For the moment, this means that all of the kid-stuff is out in the room, but that will change after M&S come over to see what they want to take - if we keep it, it will go in the crawlspace in our room; the more likely scenario is that it will get donated, along with the remaining baby clothes and the zillion pullups and swim diapers we bought on clearance a week before TRex stopped needing them.

And that's my story. It occurs to me that the only thing more pathetic than spending a Friday night cleaning and organizing is spending a Friday night cleaning and organizing and then blogging about it.

*Points to anyone who gets this reference. And I suddenly think I've played that particular "guess the cultural reference" game before. Oh well.

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