A little focused attention

31 May 2013

Our old house has two full baths and there’s one that’s primarily my domain. I shower there and get ready for my day. My husband rarely steps foot in it.

So I have no one to blame but myself that the bathroom closet was a nightmare. For something like ten years, items went in and seldom came out.

I look in that closet pretty much daily. And each time I’d wince a little and say to myself, “I need to deal with that closet.” I think part of the problem is that I open that bathroom closet primarily when I’m getting ready to go and can’t act on the impulse.

But last weekend, finally, I decided to do something about it. I think the fact that were having a houseguest (the fabulous Margaret Lukens) helped motivate me to take action.

The first step was to take a few embarrassing before pictures (please don’t judge):

Then I started with the floor, throwing away obvious trash as I came to it and putting the other stuff on a 6-foot folding table to sort. I sorted items from one shelf at a time and within a couple of quite painless hours, the job was done. I threw away a whole lot of expired, unloved, and unused stuff. (I found some collars of now-departed dogs and put those in a marked bin in the basement.) And I organized what I kept, using Itso bins from Target primarily and, of course, my handy labelmaker.

It is amazing what a big difference a little focused attention can make! Here are the after pictures.