Shout out to my newest favorites: IHeart Organizing and Organizing Made Fun! They have given me so many ideas and I love looking through their old projects. They do a great job of sharing from their readers as well.
Between these blogs and me being organized as well, I really had an itch to do something.
These last couple weeks doing laundry there has been absolutely no space in Dylan's top drawer, which holds his socks and underwear. He got some new socks for Christmas and now nothing fits. But I kept jamming everything in there anyways.
These last month or so we have been walking the dogs in the morning. It has been a little nicer out these last couple weeks, most days, so I had been wearing tennis shoes which I usually wear a pair of my white ankle socks with. I can never find a matching pair. They would get completely lost amongst the other socks and it was taking so much time to find socks.
This week, one night after work, I finally decided I had had enough and that it was time to get my organizing on.
For my clothes, I have my own dresser plus the dresser that came with the house that is in the closet. In the closet dresser is where I keep my socks and underwear. One drawer for underwear and one for socks.
In order to separate things out, I needed some sort of divider. I know there are a lot of things I can buy out there, but I happened to have a couple boxes from Christmas, so I figured those would work just fine since I am the only one who sees inside anyways.
One of the shoeboxes was too long, so I cut off one side. This ended up working perfectly so that I could use it for another divider.
Then I had a larger shirt gift box from Macy's and did the same type of thing. Instead of making an extra divider, I used the part I had cut off to stabilize the sides since the gift box material isn't as sturdy.
A free and efficient fix if I do say so myself! I must admit these last couple days since I put this in place it has been SO much easier to find what I am looking for.
On to Dylan. Since his drawer has full, the best option I could come up with was to rearrange all of the clothes in his dresser. The problem was that the rest of his drawers we already full.
Step 1: Look through all clothes and determine what can be given away, thrown away or needs to be kept. I managed to finally throw out a couple of pairs of shorts Dylan got holes in last year and give away a couple shirts I got his permission to dispose of.
Step 2: Utilize the space better. The biggest thing? Folding the shirts. I used this amazing tip from Organizing Made Fun for folding up shirts. Not only is it easier to see what shirts are available but it really saves space. This was another drawer that was overwhelmingly full and now everything fits much better!
Now that there was more space and less clothes, I was able to go down to one drawer for shorts/pants for Dylan and one drawer for shirts. This gave me one drawer for underwear and one for socks. The socks were broken out by white and black, but with no divider (no more cardboard at the moment and I really don't think Dylan cares that much). Victory! This makes my job easier and makes Dylan more organized, which he wouldn't be inclined to do on his own.
Since I went through Dylan's clothes and organized his dresser, I figured mine could use a going through too. I ended up utilizing the same shirt folding method for my clothes. I was a little wary at first since a lot of my stuff is tank tops but everything fits much better and I can see exactly where everything is at without having to dig through it all. One thing I do have to say for this folding method is that is does take a little longer to fold, but it makes it much faster to pick out clothes. And since I do laundry on the weekends and do most of my getting dressed when I need to work, I definitely need the time more during the week and take those extra few seconds on the weekend.
Between Dylan and I's clothes we had one garbage bag full of clothes to donate and a half bag of stuff to throw away. Definitely glad I looked through it all! I am really not much of one for clutter and I had thought that since we only moved like 7 months ago that I couldn't have that much that I would want to get rid of. I was definitely wrong. There were quite a few of those articles of clothing that I just never wore last year and hadn't had time to really consider if I should keep it to try to wear this year.
Overall a great organization and declutter project that even Dylan has admitted he really appreciates.
I love iheartorganizing. Like, a lot. Maybe too much. Way to do a great (inexpensive) reorganization!
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