Finding Room to Breathe ( Storage Room Organization)

I was horrified.

My husband had rented the biggest UHaul truck available~and it didn’t all fit!

Seriously?

After I had organized and  packed and labelled and even tried the “joy-sparking method” ~ you mean, I still had too much stuff??

Moving was a big wake up call for me. I thought I was pretty good at getting rid of the “extras” in our home, but clearly, I was out to lunch in my spatial thinking.

Once we started settling into this lovely in-between house, it became glaringly obvious that we simply had too many things to reasonably manage in daily life.  (I also wasn’t thrilled at the thought of dragging it all over to the next house!)

The main living spaces are all organized and feeling fine.

But I had some dirty little secrets behind closed doors… specifically, the storage room, garage, and the under-the-deck shed.

All were crammed full of stuff.

Honestly, I was too overwhelmed to even start.

Everything piled and stacked were things that we had used and loved in our former home.

They had memories attached and some were even practical pieces of furniture that we used on a daily basis ~ before.

My eye opening moment occurred when I was reading another blogger’s review of Melissa’s new book. She commented that as a home decor blogger, keeping a lid on the decor selection was a challenge.

“That’s me!,” I thought. If I were Superman, decor would be my kryptonite.

Her method of taming the decor beast was to limit the amount to what would fit in one closet space.  Just reading the post made me jump up from my chair and decide to do something about it right away.

My husband was more than thrilled at the idea. For down at the bottom of the stairs & around the corner is a nice little storage room ~ that looked like this:

We avoided it like the plague, as trying to located anything would mean risking life and limb…

It’s a small room, but able to fit our chest deep freeze and some shelving units.

I set out to see if I could perhaps fit all the decor into the wardrobe beside the freezer.  It meant a fair bit of sorting and shuffling and purging ~ but didn’t take nearly as long as I dreaded it would.  After only a few hours, the place was shaping up to feel like a room you could breathe in.  This project then started a domino affect into the other crammed full rooms ~ in a good way.

We started listing items on our local buy and sell Facebook site, and little by little the garage and shed is clearing out, too…and – Bonus! – we have a little pile of cash to show for our efforts!

But since this is all about the storage room, do you wanna see how it looks today? (Of course you do!)   Remember how it started?:

Here it is now:

Ahh… you can walk in the door without bracing yourself for impact!:) I didn’t quite make my goal of getting all the decor in the wardrobe…

But, most of it is there.

It’s now easy to see and access when I need to grab something quickly.

The other side of the room has shelving units ~ with even some empty shelves!

This project has been more than simply an organizing one for me, though. As I came upon former creative art projects I’d done and remembered where they used to hang, I realized I didn’t need to hold on to them just because they were special at one time.  I discovered the freedom in letting go if I really didn’t care for it anymore.  For this next stage of life, I’m ready to freshen up our decor a bit & to try some new things.

I don’t know what they’re going to be yet.

But I’m going to have fun researching.:)

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