Seasonal Closet Switch-out Part II

Here is some simple math. If you have 100 feet of hanging space in your closet you should have 100 feet - or less - of items to hang.

When she ran out of room in her closet, this client set up shop at the foot of her bed. Not only is this unsightly, but it invades her a space which should be serene.

We were able to move all this to her actual closet after discarding some outdated clothes.

Now her room no longer looks like a yard sale.

rePURPOSING Things: for Good!

I recently helped a client move from this spacious home.

They needed only a fraction of the furniture in this house for their new home - and you can imagine how much furniture a house like this can hold - so they did a very generous thing. They held a family and friends furniture sale and donated ALL the proceeds to the Parkinson's Foundation.

What an ideal way to dispose of unwanted items and do some good at the same time. Hats off to them!

rePURPOSING Things: Wrought Iron Dish Towel Rack

Moved from the kitchen to the dressing area, this towel rack has a new life as a cool sculpture holding jewelry.

The jewelry is visible and easy to select and the towel rack is destined to become a useful family heirloom.

rePURPOSING Things: Grandmother's Hankies

Cleaning out a parent's possessions to move them to assisted living or to close up house after they have died is very painful and exhausting. There are so many of their memories, and some of yours, tied up in every little item.

Here is how I transformed a surprise discovery at the bottom of my mother's dresser to a family heirloom on my daughter's bed.

When I was packing up mom's things I found dozens of hankies with goodbye notes neatly folded and preserved under her lingerie. Apparently when my parents moved in the 40's my mother's friends gave her a hanky party.  She had carefully saved them for 60 years!

I unwrapped,  laundered, and ironed each one.  Then I sewed them into a queen size quilts for my two daughters.

The older daughter got the fun, colorful ones in her quilt.

And the younger daughter got the sweet white ones with little flowers embroidered in the corners.

This labor of love linked our generations and warmed my daughters with memories of their grandma.

Moving Out, Moving In

Moving is traumatic in a bunch of different ways. Taking stock of our possessions is just one of them. I like to meet with a client BEFORE they move to help them really evaluate what they need to take with them but that is not always possible.

Here is an example of why the pre-move meeting is desirable.

This client has loads of beautiful clothes. This is the space available in her new home for her tops:

Even though she didn't measure the linear feet of her hanging tops ahead of time she managed to fit them all in - very tightly. But after settling in she realized she had too many things for her new home - clothes included - and decided to hold a yard sale.

These are the tops she discarded:

She had a yard sale before she moved. It was unfortunate that she had to give up an additional weekend morning having another. Also unfortunate was the time, money and energy she spent moving the things that didn't fit - resources she could have used having fun, being creative or following her passions.

But the happy outcome is that now her new closet is roomier, easier to navigate and, better yet, she absolutely loves everything in it.

The next time I see her I will  teach her the "hanger trick."

Closet Clean-out

This client is anticipating downsizing in the next few years so I suggested that she do a little work now to avoid a ton of work later. I began by asking where she stashed things that she hadn't retrieved in the last year.
The hiding place was her guest room closet.

For the time being she felt confident that she did not have excess clothing but that middle shelf above proved she did have excess books and magazines. She didn't even remember what was stored here so we surveyed the shelves and found that her biggest space hog was out-of-date travel guides.

We began by removing and evaluating everything.

We eliminated the majority by packing boxes of books for a library sale, tearing and filing pages from magazines with articles she wanted to keep and filling over half a 96 gallon recycling bin (!) with the rest.

We integrated what was left by shelving the remaining books she wanted to read where she could see them - on an open bookcase in her office. We now had room to get her sewing machine off the floor where it might get kicked. What remained were cleaning supplies specific to that area of the house and some books for overnight guests so we put them back on the shelves. My next step would be to store the linens for the guest bed on the freed-up shelving.

Total time: one hour.

Bedrooms are for Sleeping

What do you see when you look at the corner of this bedroom? The simple, serene statue on the shelf?  Or the messy, massive piles of papers on the chair? It is too bad as the chair by the big sunny window would make a sweet spot to stop and contemplate, or maybe read one of the magazines in this photo. But there are just TOO MANY magazines to digest and the clutter invades what should be a room for rest and rejuvenation.

In about 90 minutes the client and I sorted these papers, cleared the chair and moved the matching pillows to their proper place. But this progress is only temporary if she doesn't have a long-term, workable plan to manage her papers.

This generous, nurturing woman saves catalogues for potential gift purchases and hangs on to magazines with recipes, decorating ideas and articles to send to family and friends. My bet is that she will not ignore her impulse to save what she reads and share it with her friends in the name of clutter control. So what she needs is a way to store it until she has time to send it and a way to retrieve it once that time has come.

Her best bet is to tear out the relevant pages, write the date on them and file them by category: cook, mail, buy, decor. Then once a week she can open the files and in about one half hour: order the things she wants to buy, make a grocery list for recipes she wants to try, mail the articles she wants to send and move the best decorating ideas to a more permanent folder.

Then she can relax on her paper-free chair, look at her statue and enjoy her distraction-free bedroom.

RePURPOSING Spaces: A San Diego Cottage

Lisa lives in a darling two-bedroom, two-bathroom, two-story cottage with a bedroom and bath upstairs and a bed and bath downstairs. The small bedroom upstairs was her “home office” but, filled with boxes, it was really was more storage than office. The large downstairs room was her bedroom with a double closet, a wide hallway, a bathroom with a tub and French doors opening to the backyard.

When her partner moved it created an opportunity to evaluate how space in this house was used. Much like our house, their rooms did not fully match their functions so they decided to switch the bedroom with the office.

Here is the downstairs mid-move:

Switching rooms made sense for a number of reasons:

·      Sleeping upstairs eliminated the trek up to the shower every morning and back down to the closet to get dressed.

·      The smaller upstairs room was just the right size for the bed and its smaller closet was just the right size for their clothes.

·      The larger room downstairs had space for the desk and they could add bookshelves to hold what was in the storage boxes.

·      Its double closet was large enough for both off-season clothes and some office storage.

·      Floor space was opened up for practicing yoga.

·      And they got a big bonus - a view of the backyard during the day.

RePURPOSING Spaces: Our Bedroom

Living in a small house has been a large lesson in seeing ways to use space beyond the obvious.

Here is a photo of the first time we saw the Front Bedroom as potential home-buyers:

It is exactly the same size as the Back Bedroom and the bathroom is directly between the two but this one must have been designated the "Master Bedroom" because it had the largest closet. So, influenced by the home staging and without questioning the room functions, we moved in and set up our bed.

The house had minimal closet space so we added IKEA wardrobes and used the Back Bedroom as a home office.

Then one day it hit me. Why were we sleeping in the sunniest room in the house and spending waking hours in the darkest room? Wouldn’t it make sense to switch? But we'd have a lot less closet space because the sunny room had a picture window and, therefore, less wall space for the wardrobes. They would have to go. Could we live with less clothes?

Like most people, we wore 20% of our clothes 80% of the time. After deciding we’d rather have a sunny spot to work rather than clothes we rarely wore, we whittled down our wardrobes. Most of my husband’s everyday clothes were folded and put in a dresser. He selected his favorite shirts, sports jackets, ties and belts to hang in his 29" Back Bedroom closet.

I did the same in the Front Bedroom closet with mine. To save space, we stored seasonal clothes in protective bags under our bed.

Without the wardrobes we had space for a guest sofa bed in the Front Bedroom. So now we have a bright, sunny place to read, do projects or use the computer and our guests have some privacy.

Plus we sleep much better in the darker Back Bedroom, our romantically cozy "new" Master Bedroom.