Declutter challenge #5

For my challenge today I decided to do something fairly easy. I decided to clean out my hall closet.

I’m not sure why I thought this would be easy. I know it was a mess. I couldn’t even close the sliding doors properly. To take pictures I had to rearrange stuff so I could get the doors all the way open.

This closet is designed to hold coats, I suppose. But I don’t use my front door so it has become a dumping ground.

Here’s the floor of the closet (sorry for the blur):

Here’s the shelf:

I started with pulling everything out. Just to get everything out required longer than the 15 minutes I usually take for these projects.

Here’s a partial list of the stuff I found: Ozzie’s travel cage, 2 folding chairs, wrapping paper and gift bags, games, jigsaw puzzles, a small wet/dry vac, 2 of the evil mil’s jackets, 3 baskets, paper towels, a board, broken blinds, 2 curtain rods, a pool cue, pillows, 2 chip and dip plates, a blanket, a pen and ink drawing, cat toys that were given up for lost when they escaped under the door.

I also had a bit of a moment when I found a bag of romantic cards that I’d never seen before. I was about to cuss out the ex when I realized that they were to the evil MIL. Creepy.

This was a hard place to give stuff away. I had to keep repeating to myself that it didn’t matter how nice things were, if I’m not using it then it needs to go to someone who will. There was a very nice backpack and a laptop bag. I don’t need either one but they were nice enough that I had to force myself to put them in the goodwill bags.

So now 2 bags of garbage and 5 goodwill bags later my closet contains:

On the floor – Ozzie’s travel cage, a swiffer mop, my vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner (which have never been able to live in the closet before), paper towels, 2 folding chairs

On the shelf – 2 small jigsaw puzzles, wrapping paper, a box of gift bags, swiffer refills

Time – 1 hour