Hall Closet: Sparkling Clean & Oh So Wonderfully Organized!

I was feeling all great about my progress on cleaning out and organizing a messy hall closet when I decided to take a little break to catch up with a couple blogs. What I stumbled across made me sit back and have a little laugh at my efforts. Shelley from House of Smiths has a pantry clean up that is inspiring, truly an organizational job that is done with style! Lining the walls behind the shelves with pretty vinyl paper makes this pantry a thing of beauty. Check out Shelley's post to see the transformation here.

If any of you are still with me, here is a run down of what happened during my clean up!

Not too bad. I approached this project by getting two large boxes to fill with any items worth donating, garbage bags for anything that should have been tossed a while ago, wicker baskets for storage and a lot of ziploc bags.

This pile of random items is what was in front of the bins, the actual content hidden away inside the bins were emptied and sorted through later! Where did that lamp shade come from? This closet is deep and I was amazed at the amount of stuff our family had managed to tuck away, back in its recesses, over the last couple of years.

The game shelf is what surprised me! How is it possible we have that many games?

They were sorted through, with the ones used frequently put back on the shelf and the others donated to Goodwill.

What a mess! Bags of seasonal decor, acrylic paint, ribbon, wrapping paper and lots and lots of odds and ends.

Sort, toss, clean, pack up and organize into piles of similar items.

Then I tackled the bins.

Organize, organize, organize.

Finally, the post-its used for identifying the bin contents while sorting were replaced with pretty labels, and this project was done.

before

after

It can't begin to compare with Shelley's pantry, but I'm just happy to be able to find what I need. Here's to it staying this way...for a while.