Hey all! My sister and niece are heading into to town today and we're hosting a birthday party for my 2-year-old niece this weekend. :) I have to get back to cleaning, but first I wanted to quickly show you what I sat working on for HOURS yesterday.
I sat down at 12:30 and didn't leave the room till about 6. It was a marathon. My family brought me food. 😂 I blogged about my need for photo organization (both online and printed) a few months ago. You all shared so many good ideas -- be sure to check on the comments on that post for recommendations.
For now, I just needed to get this cleaned up. When we had the bathtub torn out of the bathroom behind this closet the banging caused a couple of the photo boxes to fall. It was a total mess and every time we got something out of here a few new photos would come fluttering from up top:
It was even worse than it looks. I would try to stuff back up on top but it just made things worse than before:
I haven't addressed these boxes of photos in probably ten years, so it was time to at least get them sorted.
It took forever. For.ev.er.
This is what I sat in the middle of for most of the time:
It always gets worse before it gets better. :)
Before I would keep every single photo, no matter the quality or who was in it. Now, as I get older, I look at them differently. I tossed hundreds of pictures -- duplicates, people we don't know, blurry pics, old photos that were damaged, pictures of people we're not in touch with anymore...it was a major purge.
It felt SO GOOD. I was able to fit everything in the photo boxes we already had, and that included adding in an entire box just of band photos from my husband's 30+ years of band directing.
I purchased this large portfolio for big stuff from the Container Store a few months ago:
It holds laminated newspaper articles, posters, some really large old photos and other random stuff that wouldn't fit anywhere else.
I cleaned out the long boxes and used one for mementos (it goes on the other side of the closet) and this one holds 8x10 sizes:
I spent nearly six hours going through the photos and then organizing the closet a bit again. It felt good. The larger white boxes that I use for each school year (see this post for more) are going to the storage room since we don't touch them much anymore. Someday I'll go through them with our son and whittle those down too.
We have a CLEAN closet again!:
That big monstrosity is a steamer my husband uses. Someday I'd like to put it in our master but for now we store it here.
Over the years many of you have mentioned you store luggage under your beds. I wish we could do that because I think that's a brilliant solution! None of our beds are tall enough, so they stay here:
I use simple cardboard boxes to hold our photos. They have protected them well for 20+ years now. I finally labeled them -- all this time I would pull a box down just to figure out what was inside:
Labeling is one of those things that easily could have happened years ago, but you know how I roll sometimes. :)
Here's a look at the other side -- it wasn't too bad, but I got rid of a few pillow inserts and a blanket and was able to consolidate a bit:
You can't really see the simple shelves I built into that end but they are a life saver! You can go here to see how I built those for next to nothing.
The funny thing is (not so funny really, I kind of want to cry thinking about it) that I didn't even begin to go through all of the photos. I only sorted through those that didn't have a home -- maybe two boxes of the eight? I want to go through each box (holding hundreds of photos) with my sister someday and we can decide together what to keep and share. I hope to get the boxes knocked down to six at the very most. But that's for another day!
It is so much fun to look through the old photos though! I have so many I'm going to share on my personal Facebook page because they bring back so many wonderful memories.
Our local IKEA will be done this fall and I have a plan to redo all of our closets next year. I know we're not using them to their potential (all that space at the top!) so I'm excited to tackle that someday. Those wire shelves are the bane of my existence. ;)
If you missed my previous post about photo storage and organization and you have any helpful tips, please feel free to share them here! This is just my first step in this process so I welcome your advice.
Post a Comment