My Great Challenge: Master Bedroom

Hi friends,

I am still very busy on this de-cluttering journey. There was one particular task I was truly not looking forward to tackling and that was the Master Bedroom Closet, which happens to contain my wardrobe.

This is what it looked like before:

To some, it may not look all that messy, but what you cannot see in this picture is the second row of clothes behind the first one. In addition, I can honestly attest to the old say "we wear 80% of the time, 20% of our clothes". There are some items here I have not worn since we moved to our home in 2010, some even longer!

So to tackle this process I made the decision to empty out the entire closet in order, from left to right.

Each item was then placed on one of three piles:

The keep pile:

The donate pile:

And the throw away pile (for some garments that are too worn out, have holes or stains).

And I found myself with a lot of empty hangers...

Once I had emptied the closet, I replaced all "keep" items and sorted them by kind/category: pants together, long sleeve shirts together, etc.

This is not a traditional closet, in fact, I would go as far as saying this is by far the worst closet one could have because it is straight under the roof (attic closet) and therefore is very low but deep. This makes it difficult to navigate and quite unsightly too. But I have learned to live with what I have and it is by far the best closet I have ever had, so there is always something positive to say!

Instead of keeping my large pull drawers near the floor, I decided to stack them into one column, this makes it much easier to access every day items such as t-shirts.

I bought this plastic bin at Target to use as storage for camisoles and tank tops.

In the past, I would fold clothes horizontally (filing them on top of one another), but having thought about this for a while, I decided to try another system by which one would file items vertically. It turns out that it saves an amazing among of space and also keeps the drawers organized since nothing is moved around in order to pull one item out of the drawer.

I was able to fit 16 cotton turtleneck sweaters in one single drawer!

I followed the same principle for t-shirts...

and for the camisoles and tank tops.

I went from this:

To this:

And managed to get three large bags of clothes out of the way!

For shoes and purses, I used the empty bottom space of the old TV armoire I had turned into a wardrobe for my husband:

In there, I keep those shoes I rarely wear such as fancy evening shoes or high heels. I also found the space for my good purses and all my scarves (in the purple box).

Because none of my shoes are actually kept in their original box, I took a picture of each pair and taped it to the front of the boxes...I am never going to open one box after the other in order to find that one pair I am looking for!