The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Due to the water damage from the heating pipes, I’ve had to move all my stuff from the guest bedroom to the master bedroom (I previously had surrendered the master bedroom due to Michelle’s quantity of clothing), and our place has been a disaster ever since. We’ve made small steps by cleaning out the basement and moving lots of stuff down there, but in general our apartment has felt very cluttered since the incident.

Enter the New Closet! We went to The Container Store for their annual closet sale and picked up an entirely new closet. I had previously used the Elfa closet stuff for a linen closet and an pantry, but this was my first time using it for a clothing closet. I think the previous system was a Home Depot dealio, and it pretty much sucked. It was impossible to fit very much into the closet–which says a lot considering that it’s 8′6″ long, and it was unpleasant to use, leaving the closet completely cluttered, resulting in the pattern that things put in there where never to be used again (it’s amazing how much an uninviting closet will cause you to avoid it).

While I don’t any pictures of the before closet because I didn’t think to take them, here are some during the construction. I have to say that I’m very happy with the result. For the price, the Elfa stuff delivers a pretty decent custom closet.

We put everything that was in the closet onto and around the bed to get it out of the way. The picture above is the mess of the bedroom while I was rebuilding the closet, minus four garbage bags of clothes that Michelle is going to donate to Goodwill. That mess was similar to Wing’s messy bed

The closet under construction.

The completed work!”