Cleaning out the Closet

  I wasn't always such a clean freak. In fact, I can recount years upon years of my life when I didn't clean at all. Oh, and I kept everything!! Yep, quite the pack rat, but not so much anymore. I now love the whole organization process. If Ryan let me, I'm sure that I could spend hours upon hours and dollars upon dollars on organizational products! But I've now been doing such a good job at clearing away extra clutter and storing away or getting rid of things we don't need or are not using right now, that I no longer have anything to put in all of the things that I have to hold things. Let's just take a moment to enjoy these photos of containers:

  I mean COME ON! Now it's bad enough that I've got an Ikea a half an hour away, but I'm pretty sure that Ryan wouldn't even let me out of the house if we had a Container Store here! MMmmm, things to put things in, I love it! (yes, maybe a little too much)
  What was I talking about? Oh yeah, organizing. So anyway, I made Ryan help me clean out the closet the other day. Well, technically I already had my side cleaned out and we just needed to go through some of his clothes. My rule of thumb is if you haven't worn it it 6 months, or you're not going to wear it in the next 6 months, it's gotta go. So, one by one, I held up each shirt and each pair of pants and made him make split decisions on each article of clothing. If you think too much about it you can justify everything. Never allow more than a few seconds when making these types of decisions. We split them into three categories. Keep'em: which I immediately placed on a hanger and hung up in the closet. Then a pile to donate/trash, and a third to box up and store away until  we lost a little more weight and they fit again. The goal with the stored boxes of clothes is that once we both achieve our goal weight we can throw out/donate the clothes we currently have in the closet and pull out those boxes and it's like buying a while new wardrobe (but A TON cheaper!).
  We've got a big walk-in closet, but didn't have a dresser for some of the smaller clothes items (i.e. socks). So we actually went out to Ikea and bought a little bookshelf and some inserts and it works perfectly! And for around $60 for all of it, it was totally affordable!
  Now I am far too embarrassed to show any "before" pictures, but as for the "after" pictures, well here you go!
  It really didn't take that long, and it feels so much better to be able to look in the closet and not see pile of clothes everywhere. I guess we'll just have to wait and see just how long it lasts!