Walk In Closet Bedroom Makeover

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Look, you guys, you can now see the floor in my closet bedroom! :)

If you read this post two weeks ago, about our goal to get our house organized, and de-clutter our lives, you saw the "before" picture of my closet bedroom. Here's a little reminder:

(Yes, there was floor somewhere under that pile of shoes!)

Well, it was quite a journey, but my walk in closet bedroom is finally clean and organized! I think in total I spent about 20 hours picking up all the clothes and shoes and moving them to the hallway, picking up all the lint roller sheets, bobby pins, packaging material and other random things off the floor, vacuuming, and then sorting the clothes and shoes into keep or donate piles, and then further sorting them by tops, bottoms, dresses, etc so I could hang them up in an organized manner. Whew, just reading that all back makes me tired all over again!

In the midst of the sorting madness:

(Sorry for the crappy cell phone pics! Can you spot my kitty hiding out between the piles?)

After I finally sorted out what I was going to get rid of, which wasn't easy, I ended up with 6 full lawn-sized garbage bags of clothes to give to charity. I think I easily gave away half of the clothes in my closet! Bye bye boobalicious shirts from college, and even a few sundresses I hadn't worn since high school (that would be 10 years ago!).

I also struggled with giving up some of my shoes. I know I said I wasn't going to get rid of any shoes, but I did, two huge bags of them. Sigh! They will be missed, but hopefully they'll find a new home where someone will wear them more than once every five years. I still need to go through the big box of shoes I have in the garage, but I wanted to concentrate on one room at a time!

Then it was time to move on to setting up my garment racks and spending HOURS hanging up everything, as well as crawling around on the floor, matching up pairs of shoes.

(Hailey was trying to help by rubbing her face on the shoes and knocking them over.)

So now, here is my finished closet bedroom! It's a really small bedroom (the size you'd prefer for a home office over an actual bedroom), so I took photos in a clockwise direction all the way around, so you could get a 360 degree idea of the layout, starting with a photo taken from the doorway.

This garment rack and the two shoe racks on either side I kept empty on purpose. It's going to be my staging rack, where I'll lay out 3 weeks worth of work outfits and shoes at a time.

The actual, tiny, closet in the room.

I iron every single day, so I need a place for my ironing board to always be set up. Also, check out the purse rack that my husband made for me, out of a scrap piece of wood and screw in hooks!

I've had this dresser since I was a little kid, and still love it. The best part about its location right now is that it is on top of the heating vent. And although it's away from the wall enough to let the air flow into the room, it also makes my socks nice and warm in their drawer! :)

Decor-wise, I think about the only thing this room needs is a window treatment of some kind, to add a little color to that wall. There's so much else going on in here that the clothes and shoes are almost like decoration themselves!

I'm also quite proud of myself for using only what I could find around our house to make some improvements in here. I really didn't want to have to buy anything new for this project, so I didn't.

I was able to find uses for some of the wicker baskets we used at our wedding, one to hold my stockpile of slippers (I seem to go through a pair of slippers every couple of months, so received a lot for Christmas), and one to hold all of my flip flops. Repurposing AND easy organizing at its best!

If you couldn't tell from the 360 degree photos, I was really in need of some additional shoe racks. But since I couldn't buy more, I made one out of some white painted boards and shoe boxes. Not the most fancy solution, but it worked well to get some of the shoes off the ground and utilize the vertical space under the garment rack, and will do for now.

I also made use of part of my window sill to display some of my boots, making it a little easier to get to a few of them. Although most are still just lined up on the floor next to my dresser. Tall boots are so hard to find places for, since they never fit on shoe racks!

As a quick and dirty way of organizing my scarves, I just draped them over the top drawer of one of my plastic drawer units, that I use to hold crafting supplies. It's not the most convenient, although I don't get into my drawer of pillow forms very often, but with limited space, it seems like a good place to store the scarves for now, where they're visible, and easy to grab on my way out the door.

Another basic thing I added was a garbage can under my ironing board. I know, this is a "duh" thing I should have had in here before, but I didn't. And as a result I had SO many used lint roller sheets and little cardboard price tags on my floor before, so hopefully this will be an easy way to keep the garbage from piling up.

I always seem to have trouble keeping my jewelry organized, specifically my earrings, which I wear every single day. Necklaces and bracelets are a bit easier, because they can all consistently be hung up somehow. But my earrings always end up just spread out in a big pile on my dresser, which sometimes means they go missing when they fall into a drawer. So now I am keeping them contained in a little box from a Victoria's Secret perfume gift set. It will be a lot harder for them to fall off my dresser now.

And finally, the last improvement I made to the closet bedroom was a shoe calendar that I got for Christmas! It fits perfectly with the closet room, and now I've got shoe porn to look at in here, as well as on my desk at work (I also got a shoe-a-day desk calendar).

I've actually saved the last 4 years of shoe desk calendars, and someday I want to frame like 60 of the individual shoe photos, and hang them on the walls above my garment racks, or maybe on a wall above my dresser. That won't happen until we own a house though, because that would be a TON of holes in the wall. The hardest part about that little project will be choosing which shoes to frame, since you have to flip the calendar halfway through the year and there are shoes on both sides of the sheets.

So anyway, there's a look at my new and improved walk in closet bedroom! What do you think? Not bad for a $0 investment, and just some of my time! Now I just need to stick with keeping my clothes hung up and shoes all lined up, so it doesn't get messy again. Hopefully though, because I gave away about half of my clothes and shoes, it will be a lot easier to maintain now!