In our house, Caleb’s room contains a normal sized closet where he keeps his clothes.  It also contains a huge closet where we keep/hide our junk.  In the model house, this space was used for another bathroom, but I guess when the original owners were building this house, they opted out of the additional bathroom.

I love this closet!  It’s awesome to have a big place to store stuff/junk.  And I have plans of possibly turning this space into a crafting room maybe someday after our kids leave home.  I’ll keep dreaming!

One of my goals for Christmas break was to clean out the closet.

This is really embarrassing, but below is a picture of the closet before I started.  It was so bad that you couldn’t walk in it at all.  Our precious stuff/junk had been thrown in, stacked high on other things until it fell over, etc.

I started when Chris was out running errands, but when he got home he wanted in on the action!  Who could pass up this fun?

We dug everything out of the closet into Caleb’s room to go through it all to decide what we were going to keep and what was going back into the closet.

We wound up getting rid of about 95% of everything in there.  Old boxes of books, boxes of things we hadn’t gone through since we’ve been married, a ton of bags that we never use, etc.

By that evening, Caleb’s room and the downstairs were full of things that we were going to get rid of and we didn’t have much room left to work in.

Chris was so done with this project that he was ready to throw in the towel for the night, but I said “if we don’t finish this tonight, it may never get done!”  So we hunkered down and knocked it out.

The next morning, I loaded all the trash up in our van…

and took it to my parents’ house since they have a ton of room to put out trash.

On a side note, I love throwing things away.  It makes me feel good.  Less things in my house.  Until I realize how much trash our family creates.  Then I get disgusted and it makes me want a burn barrel like my great-grandmother had at the farm.  Burn it all!  But then I think that probably wasn’t good for the environment either and go back to throwing things away.

The next day, I went out to our fire pit and burned old financial papers/records we didn’t need anymore.

And here’s the closet now!  SO much better!

I even got a new drawer thing to put all my craft stuff in.  My craft stuff may be the most organized things in my house!

Now to not pile more things into this space!

I’m glad to have this project checked off my list, along with going through the kids’ rooms, finishing painting the hall upstairs (Chris did this), making gifts for family and friends, spending time with family for the holidays, etc.

Now I need another week of break to rest!