Last day of organizing closets...phew!

I was so grateful for Nichol from Nik's Knack Home Organizing to come and help clean out the closets.  This week, we went through the older boys' closets and made some tough decisions.  There were things that I was holding onto for emotional reasons and Nichol helped me work through that.  I learned that it is not healthy for our home to say yes to peoples' hand-me-downs out of fear of their reaction. I know right? Sounds silly.   "Angela, you just don't have the room or the time to go through it. Don't let it in to your home. You have to say no."  Wise advice.  This is why if there are rooms or closets that need to be cleaned out, it is a good...no great idea to hire someone like Nichol to help you or ask a friend to join you.  There can be some emotional things to work through and when you are alone, it's easy to just ignore them.  When you have someone with you to say,"Hey, that's not going back in there until we deal with the issue.", you can get rid of some REAL baggage.  It was an empowering afternoon.  Here is the wonderful progress we made.

BEFORE

AFTER

We color coded the boys' hangers so that I know what belongs to who.  They are only 22 months apart and so close in size it's hard to keep it all straight.  Munch is blue and Bubblegum is white. Nichol also used red hangers to separate the sizes.  She used her handy label maker to label the hanger with what size was behind it.   

Here is what I would eventually like to do with the boys' closet. 

Nichol recommends keeping the clothes where the boys can reach them so they can do it themselves.  Keep the clothes you don't want them to get at up higher, out of their reach.

I love the Ikea Expedit shelf look.  These boxes are neat too and you can find them almost anywhere. 

Serenity Now blog

If we had more storage space, I would take the closet doors off and do something like this, with the curtains.  Seems there is more room in doing that. Ahh, one day!