Lighten My Life - Project 1

So my goal this year is to Lighten My Life in many ways.  One of the big goals is to get rid of a lot of the clutter that we have accumulated living here for almost 6 years.  Hubby and I started the decluttering in our closet, which was in RIDICULOUS shape.  Now this closet is plenty big enough, in fact, it's one of the things I really liked about the house when we bought it.  But we had been cramming stuff in there for years, and it was finally about to burst!

I have to apologize for these pictures - I said to Hubby "Take some before pictures of the closet" and this, sigh, is what I got....  (He kicked butt on closet cleaning, so he gets props there for sure!).  So here's some before pictures....

View to the left:

And it was actually so much worse than this looks - just below the bottom of the picture are 2 totes covered in giftbags from Christmas.  I could barely reach my clothes hanging there.

View to the right:

Don't my purses look like they are about to fall down on top of your head...yeah, not good....

View straight ahead (super blurry - sorry):

Step one - everything out!  This is the first time since we moved in to the house that the closet has been empty, and it was wonderful! Hubby & I vacuumed every nook, cranny & corner & wiped down all the shelves, bars and baseboards.

The best thing we did was pile all our clothes in the tub!  We each went through our own clothes and threw the items to be donated to the right into our bedroom and the items we wanted to keep went straight back in to the closet.  It worked wonderfully, and we got rid of TONS of items that were clogging up the closet. 

Next, we put items back on the shelves (we don't have a linen closet, so towels and sheets, along with my sweaters & sweatshirts live on the shelves.) Since the baby's room is upstairs, we have a makeshift changing table in our closet on top of some drawer units so we don't have to go upstairs all the time to change her.  Before we started putting things back in, we thought a lot about what was and wasn't working with the arrangement in there. And we decided to move where that "changing table" was located and how Hubby's clothes were arranged as well.

Here's the AFTER:
View to the left:

I went from having my clothes on the 2 bars you see above and part of the bar to the right, to just the top bar and part of the left bar - the whole bottom bar is empty now!  Plus the shelves actually have EMPTY space on them now, and you can walk all around the closet.  The new layout is working wonderfully, and it actually makes me feel LIGHTER having done this! And you can't tell in this picture, but my clothes on the top bar are actually grouped by color.  Yeah, I'm a geek....See the purses now - nicely lined up, not about to fall....
And the view to the right:

Of course, Baby A needed to remind us of how it looked before (so we wouldn't return to that sad condition. I'm sure she's just thinking of us!):

And here was the result of Lighten My Life Project 1:

That's actually 14 (!) trash bags of clothes, shoes and purses, plus 3 boxes to Goodwill.  Now THAT'S lighter!