unused space

while our house has been feeling FULL of stuff lately, i'm discovering lots of poor use of the space that we have. we are two adults and a toddler living in a 4 bedroom house - we should have tons of room. however, every room seemed full to the max. the idea of emptying out the "guest room" (aka. mess room) to turn it into ben's big boy room seemed daunting. the closet was full to the gills of boxes of ben's baby clothes AND bins of my own clothes that did not currently fit. there was a big bookshelf in that room that had the maximum amount of books that it could hold. where was all this stuff going to go?

re-organizing has been weighing heavy on my mind. i started unpacking all the boxes of ben's clothing and reorganizing it into different categories: save for alyssa's boy (if she has one), give away, sell, and "a girl could wear this". after going through all these boxes, i was feeling like i'd only made more of a mess. now, the boxes were all over the guest room instead of being contained in a couple closets. augh. i closed the door to the guest room and tried not to go in there. "we'll have ben's room ready in time for his birthday", i'd say to give myself an end date that was far in the future.

then may ended. it is june. ben's birthday is a couple weeks away and the guest room was still a mess. where was all this stuff going to go?

so as i looked around my house, i started to find poorly used space. there's a wall-length shelf in our bedroom that was here when we moved in. we hated it because it was way too high. instead of taking it down, we left it to gather dust...for 6 years. yesterday morning, i dusted it off and moved all our books (minus business/teaching/photo albums) out of the guest room and into our bedroom. they fit just perfectly.

then, i clearly labeled all the boxes of ben's clothes and put them all on the shelf in his closet (in his current room). then i had to figure out what to do with these bins of my own clothes. the problem with having been sizes 4 - 12 in the last 3 years is that i have a lot of clothes that don't fit me but are too nice to toss because (fingers crossed) i will be these smaller sizes again one day. but where to keep bins of clothes? why not the closet? because it's full of junk.

i had a shoe shelf under the hanging clothes that had about 6 - 7 shoeboxes on it collecting dust. i had a couple bags beside it where i couldn't even see them and a number of purses that i hadn't used in awhile. i started pulling the boxes off the shelf and realized all but one was EMPTY! all this time, i'd figured there were shoes in there! i guess all my shoes migrated to the front hall closet and left their boxes behind. it occurred to me that i probably don't need this shelf taking up space. i cleaned it all out and now have room for 3 large bins in my closet.

i also have two shelves above where my clothes hang that had some random articles of clothing thrown up there and forgotten about. i pulled those down, emptied out the current bins of clothes and started separate into sizes. now each size has it's own bin so as i lose weight (oh, i can't wait to not be so huge anymore!), it will be easy to figure out where the clothes are. i bought a couple smaller bins to go on the two high shelves as well so that i've maximized the space in my closet. an amazing feat that took hours upon hours.

phew. so we moved the last of the boxes for goodwill out of the guest room this morning and got the single bed upstairs and in the room! we are on our way.