Lined up

I enjoy organizing, but I hate cleaning. Anyone else know what I mean? Organizing is fun because it’s creating a pattern, almost like art. You can line things up by size or color or frequency of use. You can create cute little boxes or baskets to put odds and ends in so they’re not just an eye sore. Fun times. Cleaning, on the other hand, is not like art. It’s like work. Pain in the butt work. Dishes, laundry, toys: piles and piles of stuff that multiply and never end. I’ve found that I can happily clean while I organize but I can’t organize while I clean. This is because the cleaning will never get done. Meaning, if my goal is to organize, a good deal of cleaning will obviously happen in the process. But if my goal is to get everything clean, stopping to look something over and decide whether or not to keep it and where it should go and then moving other things around to better locations to accommodate my new system: doesn’t work.

Just ask my mom.

I used to drive her nuts when I was supposed to be cleaning my room and I would spend a solid 5 minutes starting at each individual item I had picked up, reminiscing about where and when I got it, etc., before moving it all of 6 inches to the left. She also used to hate taking me shopping for clothes. I always had a definite picture in my head of what I wanted to get and we never could find a store that could read my mind.

But I digress.

My awesome SIL spent the past few days organizing most of the closets in her house. She posted pictures of the before and after this morning and suddenly I remembered how much I like organizing. So after half a morning in our master bedroom closet, here is a before and after of my own.

Before

      

My heck-a-cute kids

After

A couple weeks ago I did some work on my side (the garbage bag in the first picture has a bunch of my clothes in it to donate.) So today I did Kevin’s side, which included sorting through all the baby clothes I’d thrown in there as the boys grew out of them. See how pretty?

All color sequenced  

Told you I love a good pattern. Of course, most of these shirts had been in that pile on the floor for a while. But wrinkled is the new ironed right?

I don’t think you can see very well in these pictures but I have only white hangers for my side and only blue hangers for Kevin’s side. I did that last year and I think it really helps make things look nicer when there aren’t 15 different types and colors of hangers floating around the closet. Only problem is, if I ever need to jimmy the lock on my car; no wire coat hangers to be found. Ah, well, c’est la vie.