Forty Weeks: Before & After: Closet Cleaning

One of the first must-do DIY projects in the house was to revamp our tiny closet to maximize the space. Container Store has this closet system called Elfa that I really liked. I originally liked the dark wood veneers, but because our closet was small, we decided to use birch instead to lighten it up.

Image via Elfa

You see, when we first moved in our house a couple of years back, the closet in the master bedroom was made up of plain, old, one shelf solution. I didn't have a before, before picture, but it's very similar to this one.

Image via A Jones for Organizing

It took us the whole morning to take out the old closet shelves and plug the holes... overnight to let it dry... and another afternoon to install our custom Elfa.

If we had not changed our closet system, I don't know how we were going to fit all our clothes (and my purses) in our teeny tiny closet. Fast forward to 2010, our closet looked like this. It was a MESS! Eeek.

Before

So one winter morning, I decided to purge, purge, purge... edit, edit, edit... our clothes and accessories. Tim Gunn and Martha Stewart would have been proud of me. The first thing I did was to take out ALL of the closet stuff out into the bedroom.

Let me tell you, laying out all the clothes on the bed, the boxes on the floor, and the purses on the dresser filled up our whole bedroom space. It was scary. Scary like the bedroom of a professional hoarder. I didn't take a picture of it because I didn't want to remember it at all.

Like any closet organizer would do, I got 3 boxes and took clothing that I don't want in the closet based on these categories: donate, throw away and belong somewhere else.

Okay, now here's the Elfa closet system in all its glory, with my notes on it. Since the baby will be staying with us for the first couple of months, we wanted her clothes in our closet as well. Before I got pregnant, all the baby's space in our closet was mine as well. Haha, surprise surprise. For now, I stored almost all my pre-maternity clothes - they don't fit me anymore anyway.

Here are the after pictures. It seems there isn't much of a change, but believe me, we took out half of the closet's contents already! Our clothes can now breathe.