rePURPOSING Spaces: Garage Work-out Room

The owners of this double-length San Jose garage wanted to turn the space closest to the house into a rainy-day work out area.  The first step of this rePURPOSE was to evaluate, eliminate and integrate the garage storage.

It took about one hour to sort through the piles, fill up the car for a run to Goodwill and eWaste recycling and rearrange the shelving to store like with like.

                                    

Now they have easy access to their storage items, a nice clear space to set up exercise equipment, plus protection for their car.

rePURPOSING Things: Cute Little Clutch Purse

I fell so hard for this darling, tooled leather clutch purse that I completely ignored my own rule to only use crossover purses.  I had bad experiences with clutch bags: when you put down the bag to use your hands for something other than carrying it, it often gets forgotten. Just that word - clutch - makes me shudder. But I WANTED this one and convinced myself I needed it.

This time I was going to make it work for me, dammit. To that end I bought a cute tote bag...to tote my cute clutch purse. It made perfect sense to me at the time.

When I came to my senses I was in the possession of not one, but TWO bags I couldn't use, bags that became clutter.

On a recent cleaning spree I rediscovered the cute little clutch. With a frustrated little foot stamp I whined why oh why can't it work for me. I felt determined to re-coup my investment.

So I  bought a yard of cord, had the cobbler install two tiny grommets and voila! A totally useful, and extremely cute, crossover purse!

What do you have hiding in your closet that you can re-make and actually use?

Discovering the Desk

No one in this family used this dusty desk. It was covered with faded photos and obsolete computer accessories. We began our full office clean up here. The client was so inspired she went on to finish the room, letting go of outdated projects that would not be completed, purging and re-vamping her filing system and taking an entire box of cables and connections to eWaste recycling.

Now she has an inviting space to work and write.

A Cleaner Closet

Back at the Marin condo there was a small under-the-stairs coat closet that held, I kid you not, all this:

On the sofa in the far left corner of this photos is a pile of coats, for which the closet was intended. Everything else on the floor was crammed in there, too - the majority of which had not been used in years because it couldn't be accessed.

We found items the owner forgot she had, realized she would not miss and packed them up for Goodwill. We consolidated what she did want to keep and two hours later, this is the result: