This past weekend, I came to the realization that I may have to turn my attention to our guest bedroom sooner than I had anticipated. The situation in here (specifically, the closet and storage situation) has reached a point where I just can’t deal with it much longer. Or rather, I don’t want to deal with it much longer.
On Saturday night, as I was trying to find something to wear to church the next morning, I was becoming more and more frustrated, kicking shoes out of the way, tripping over hangers, digging through a pile of clothes, etc. Something definitely needs to change, and I need to find time to implement those changes very soon.
Because I had removed the one tiny original closet in the room, I needed to add storage somewhere else in the room. So I decided to build these two closets flanking the window.
In deciding what kind of doors to put on the closets, I opted to do sliding doors. I was afraid that swinging doors may require too much space in this small room, and they wouldn’t be able to fully open. So the sliding doors seemed like a clever solution.
We’ve lived with these closets for two years now (since this guest bedroom is currently being used as our main bedroom until our addition is built), and the closet situation just isn’t working out. The closets aren’t organized well, and the sliding doors aren’t helping the situation at all.
Here’s the situation. I don’t have enough shoe storage. As you can see in the photo above, that one shelf unit is all I have for shoes. Since all of my shoes don’t fit on those shelves, and I really don’t have anywhere else to put them for now, I tend to toss the shoes that don’t fit inside the closet in front of the closet. And then they pile up like this…
And since the closet opens by sliding the door to the right over the window, and I’m only five feet tall, that pile of shoes in front of the closet (which I tidied up before taking the picture ? ) makes it very difficult to reach and slide the closet door open to access clothes.
So, as people usually do when dealing with a consistent pain-in-the-neck challenge like that, I started taking the path of least resistance. Instead of fighting the pile of shoes to open the door and hang my clothes up, I started tossing and piling my clothes onto the top of the desk between the closets (the desk where I actually used to sit and read every night, so now I can’t do that anymore, either). But the desk isn’t that big, so as the pile gets bigger, some of the clothes fall off the back and onto the floor. Others start getting piled on the little stool.
And once the pile starts falling to the floor and spreading to the stool, I can no longer push the stool all the way under the desk, which means that even on those occasions when I do stretch over the pile of shoes to try to open the closet door, it only opens halfway because now the stool is blocking the door from opening all the way.
It’s an absolute mess, and trying to live with this for much longer is simply not going to do. The bottom line is that I need to pull everything out of these closets (both of them…the other one is almost as useless), and just start over. And it all needs to start with more shoe storage since that’s the first domino that leads to all of this other mess.
I kept thinking I could just live with it, and trying to convince myself that it would be a waste to spend time working on this room when we’re going to have a bigger, better, more organized bedroom in the future. But it could still be a year before we have our new bedroom…or more. I just have no idea right now.
So I need to get this under control. It’s not just about aesthetics. I mean, yes, it looks terrible and messy. I don’t like having to look at this mess all the time, or live with it. But it’s also about creating peace in our home. And if I’m having to fight this mess every time I need to get ready to go somewhere, that affects my attitude and my mood (like when I search and search for a particular black sweater for 30 minutes and can’t find it anywhere in the pile), and that affects the peace in our home. I’ve got to get this under control, and soon.
I may have to find a temporary storage solution outside of the bedroom (perhaps in the sunroom) for my shoe storage. If I can move all of my shoes out of the bedroom, that would temporarily solve the problem. It wouldn’t be very convenient to have my shoes in a completely different room, but there’s nothing convenient about having them piled in front of the closet and not being able to use the closet, either.
So I want to get this done soon, but I also don’t want to stop working on the studio. I especially don’t want to waste days like we’re going to have this week, with the temperature in the upper 60s and low 70s. This would be the perfect week to be outside and get the rest of my studio cabinet doors and drawer fronts trimmed out, primed, and painted! So I don’t exactly know when I’ll be able to work in the closet organization, but hopefully I can find a time in the very near future.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
