The Great Closet Escapade

Hi, I'm Haley and I am a shoe horder.

Whew.  Glad I got that off my chest.  Now that you know my problem I can be honest with you about the state of my closet.  It was bad people.  BAD.

My family is relocating back to Texas in March and the house we are returning to is much smaller than the one we currently live in.  Why, on God's green earth, would we downsize with four kids you ask?  Well, my husband is retiring from the military and we're not exactly sure what the future holds for us once his service is finished.  We still own our "starter home" we purchased back in 2006 before the twins were born.  The mortgage payment is low so we felt like it was the right choice for our family now.  With the smaller house comes less space, mainly storage space.  There are four bedrooms but only 3 total closets.  You didn't do your math wrong, lol.  I said 4 bedrooms and 3 closets.  That means one bedroom doesn't even have an actual closet.  No worries.  Living in Europe taught us that closets are really optional anyway.
Back to the point of all this.  With such limited space, it's important to purge, purge, purge now, before we ever get there.  So I decided to start with my closet.  As you can tell by the picture, I've been needing to do this for a  while.  I am not, by nature, an organized person.  I have to actually WORK at being organized.  So I started by making an even bigger mess by dragging everything out of the bottom of the closet.  I'll save you the pictures of the sorting process but I ended up giving away something like 6 paper grocery sacks packed full of shoes, handbags and clothes.

I love this little trick I found on Pinterest somewhere at some point.  It really does keep my boots standing up nice and straight.  These pool noodles came from the dollar store and I used scissors to cut them to size.  Two noodles gave me enough for three pairs of boots.  (I have a spare pair of noodles ready for the next cute pair of boots I find.)

I had a few plastic shoe boxes so I used those to store some of my dressier shoes I don't wear often.  As part of the down-sizing, I've been cleaning out my craft storage and had these two drawer-type shoe boxes so I put those on bottom.  I love that I won't have to disturb the stack to get to those shoes.  I also still had the boxes from a few pairs.  Writing on the outside of the box allows me to remember what's inside without having to peek in the box.

 

Once I got everything sorted, I put it all back in.  But shoes are stinky.  And I noticed my closet had *ahem* a slight odor.  There are several ways to fight closet odor, but I'm trying to use fewer chemicals in my house.  All I used was a little Purification essential oil blend on a cotton ball then tucked the cotton ball away in a corner of the closet.

Smell gone.  Purification is an essential oil blend sold by Young Living.  If you want to know more about why I use Young Living Essential Oils, read here.

I find it amazing what you can stumble across when cleaning out closets.  Like a 20+ year-old picture of your husband hehehe.  (shhh.  Don't tell him I put this on my blog.  He might want revenge, and NOBODY needs to see 20+ year-old pictures of me!)