Declutter Challenge LAST day 31: Laundry closet

Eek! Today's the LAST "official" day of the declutter challenge. A HUGE thanks go out to Marcia for continuing this declutter thing with a weekly round-up. My poor tiny little house needs it!

I really wish I did something grandiose to celebrate the last official day, but alas all I did was declutter my laundry closet. And I don't even have a picture to show for it. Not that I didn't try mind you, but it was just impossible, unless I could be like that girl from Xmen and walk through walls, and had a camera that took pictures through walls. The hallway was just too narrow, but too long to allow me to take an angled picture from the end of it. So no picture today...but it wasn't my fault!!

Anyway, what I did was made my own laundry cart. Except that it's not so much of a cart because it doesn't move. We have a lot of those wire cubby shelf things, and they actually fit PERFECTLY between my washer and dryer. A set of these cost like $15 at Target and we have PLENTY of them, so I am definately not going to pay $150+ for those laundry tower cart thingys. They may look nicer, but I have a lot better use for $150. Besides, we have a closet door to the laundry closet, so most of the time you can't even see inside it. Definitely not paying $150 for something I can't see.

I ended up building a small tower that's 3 cubbys high. All of our laundry detergent fit into just one cubby, so I decided to use a second one for our stain-removal stuff, laundry samples, and laundry bags. I reused an old post office box to keep the bags from going everywhere. The bottom cubby just holds a trashcan since I didn't want to put anything else there in case of water damage. On top of this whole "tower", I reused a small laundry basket that was broken in the move for our plastic grocery bags. The grocery bags aren't exactly a laundry item, but they needed a home and it doesn't look too out of place because of the laundry basket.

Well, since today is the last official day, I'm going to share what I've learned. And besides the fact that I have a LOT of crap, I've come to appreciate how easy and cheap it is to declutter. I've always been under the impression that in order to seriously organize my house, I need to go and blow about $100 on organizational things like rubbermaid drawers and containers. Well, when this declutter challenge started and I decided to dedicate myself to it, we didn't have $100 OR the time to spend buying things, so I've found out just how much I can do by reusing containers.

The next recap is kind of a mute point in my case because when I started my house was full of moving boxes, but the biggest impact that I can see in my home is well...my entire home. I know it sounds like I'm dodging the question, but it's true. We were living out of boxes at the beginning of the month for the most part, or living off the floor because we emptied out of the boxes just to get rid of boxes and didn't bother putting things where they really belonged. But an "upgrade" as a result of my declutter from the old house is that I now actually have an office/desk area, where all of my electronics have a home. In the old house, the printer was in the scrapbooking closet, the laptop was on the coffee table, the camera was on the side table, the camcorder was in the bedroom, and the bluetooth was in the kitchen. None of that craziness anymore!

From now on, I think I'll just do one post every Friday for the weekly roundup instead of daily posts, but I am still going to declutter something everyday. They may not have pictures attached, and they may be a bit abnormal like "I decluttered my dog (read: I gave him a haircut)", but I will still do something everyday! I've done so good for 31 days...I can surely keep going!