Settling

A couple quick peeks at what we've been up to ...

{1}

{2}

{3}

D has been insanely busy at work, so we get very little time together lately, which has been especially hard since we normally nest hardcore after a move. I've been doing lots of little projects on my own and we were lucky to get some time on Saturday to work together and knock out some of the things on our list. We have a weird division of labor that happens in our house and I'm embarrassed to admit that I never, ever, ever hang shelves or hooks or anything on the walls. I'm just not patient enough for the entire process of measuring, leveling, etc. I hate it. It's not that I'm not handy - I like fixing things and happily spent part of Saturday taking apart our vacuum cleaner to figure out why it had stopped working, even though that took longer than the shelf hanging would have. I'm selectively impatient, I guess. Anyways ...

1. I am so lucky that D enjoys creating custom organizers for our kitchen drawers and he's done it for every place we've lived. You can only see the top layer here (and a peek at the second layer) but this is a three tier drawer organizer that holds basically all our kitchen utensils. We lay out everything, organize it by priority (most used gets top layer billing) and then he goes to work with sturdy cardboard and a hot glue gun. The finished product always amazes me. This new kitchen has a ridiculous amount of drawers, so being super efficient wasn't even really necessary, but it's still nice to have everything neatly organized. These old kitchens tend to have super deep drawers, so if you don't make organizers you're just fishing around in them.

2. The fridge is right next to the stove, and I wanted to get some use out of the space. Oddly, there aren't a lot of magnetic bar options out there, so I opted for a DIY version. This is a Grundtal rail from Ikea that I attached to the fridge using some super strong magnets. Even with the crazy magnets, this is only going to work for relatively lightweight items, but that's all I needed it for and it stays in place really well with no sliding. For extra friction, I cut small squares of nitrile from a glove (you can also use latex from a balloon) and placed it between the magnets and the fridge and the magnets and the rail attachment. I used these magnets but they are 1.75" wide which means they stick out on the edges. If I did this again, I'd probably get something a little smaller, like these 1.5" ones or these square 1.5" ones or maybe these bars, which would probably look the neatest (I might actually order these right now - I'll get back to you if they work better). EDIT - if you're thinking about doing this and using the Grundtal rail, do yourself a favor and get the bars instead of the circles. They work great and they fit so neatly. I switched mine out and love it way more now.

3. The other big project we got finished was installing a dog door for Circe (no pictures, so you'll have to accept this one of her supervising me while I clean the porch instead). She hasn't had one before so most of the weekend was spent training her that she can, in fact, go in and out at will. At this point I'm pretty sure that she is fully aware of how it works but is pretending ignorance so we'll continue to bribe her with treats.

Under the bed storage for Malm

This is a long overdue post because we've been using these under the bed storage boxes for a few months now. But they're great! Our current place feels just right for us, but at 400ish sf we definitely had to do a lot of downsizing and we still came up a little short on storage. We got more ruthless with our clothes, which means we can fit everything we own into one dresser and one closet. But because the bedroom is small we had to put the dresser in the closet, which meant there was absolutely nowhere for our shoes to go. Neither of us was quite ready to commit to living with two pairs each, so we went searching for other options.

We've had a low Malm bedframe for the last decade and it's served us well. It's survived three moves without any sign of distress. The only downside to the low bed is that you can't get storage containers to go under it. I prefer not to store stuff under the bed, honestly, so that's never been an issue. But when you're living in a small space, that real estate suddenly becomes very valuable.

If you get a higher framed Malm, you can actually get drawers that are made specifically for the bed and work perfectly with it. For a hot second (okay, fine, two days) we actually considered getting rid of our bed and buying a whole new one just so we could have the drawers. But all we really needed was space for our shoes and I knew we didn't need large drawers for that.

We looked for storage boxes that would work, but the clearance on the low Malm is just about 4 inches and we had a hard time finding anything decent.

Instead, Dustin built out some simple wooden boxes for us in just the right dimensions. Because they are sliding in and out on wood floors, we added strips of felt on the bottom edges so they'd glide easily.

{apologies for my incredibly non-inspirational shoe collection - shoes are 100% not my thing so I just wear them into the ground and then dread shopping for new ones}

They aren't tall enough for heels, but you can easily lay them sideways instead.

The next step is going to be adding a dust cover. I plan to just get some large pieces of felt, tack them down in the back and then weight down the front edge so it drapes nicely over the front of the box. This way we can easily pull the cover back to access the shoes but it will keep dust out. (Um, yeah. I still haven't done this but I'm happy to report that dust hasn't been a big issue)

I'm so happy with how these turned out and they're actually easier than our previous closet storage solution. Instead of leaving my shoes in a pile by the door I'm pretty good about putting them away as soon as I get home.

Closet strategy

So you've all been hearing about capsule wardrobes forever, right? Only using 30ish pieces of clothing or something like that? This is really appealing to me because I'm a terrible shopper and I'm finally realizing that the issue is that I don't like shopping very much most of the time*. You'd think this would mean I have less clothing, but no. It just means I have oddly assorted clothing and then wear the same things over and over again. Back in January I decided I needed to come up with a better system that would be more uniform-y and efficient. So now it's August ...

{before}

I was initially planning a pretty drastic overhaul. I wanted to cut my wardrobe down to 35 pieces (including shoes and clothes, everything except underwear and workout gear). I read through the guide at Unfancy and it seemed fairly doable (note - I've linked to the wardrobe planner but you'll need to poke around a little to get more information from her site about how she pieces out her wardrobe). I liked that it at least gave me a solid outline of how I'd want my closet allocated and what pieces I might need. I strategized quite a bit. 

But strategizing is not the same as executing. When I actually went to tackle my closet it became clear that getting down to 35 pieces all at once was going to be a huge mental effort and I was probably going to burn out my decision making power before I was done. This has happened in the past and it gets ugly. Sometimes I give up and put everything back in the closet. Sometimes I give up and toss out all my long sleeved shirts because I haven't worn them in months (ignoring the fact that it's summer) and then in October I have nothing to wear. I took a modified approach instead. 

I worked methodically, pulling out everything from one section at a time. I spread it all out and sorted into categories (tops, bottoms, special occasion, etc) to get an idea of what I had. Some pieces I knew needed to go - I didn't care about them and I hadn't worn them in forever. Some pieces were clear keepers (I'd worn them multiple times in the last few weeks). Then there were all the in-between things. Stuff I loved but hadn't worn in a long time. Pieces that could potentially be really useful (or used to be useful) but I didn't love that much. 

I started to feel overwhelmed with the decision making process so I decided to set up a clothing purgatory. Anything I wasn't sure about I marked with a piece of yellow ribbon, either knotted on the hanger or pinned on the tag. If I wear something and feel good about it, I'll take off the yellow ribbon. In a few months I'll revisit my closet and anything that still has a yellow ribbon will go. 

I also have a few purple tags, which are for pieces of clothing I do wear a lot but would like to replace with a better version soon. This way I'll know to keep my eye out for those staples. 

{hanging}

I think the marking system is what made it possible for me to get through everything without feeling overly stressed out. It's worth noting that I did not try anything on. I felt like that would just get distracting (and possibly depressing) and I was pretty sure I wouldn't finish. I'm just spreading it out a bit, since I'll eventually try these things on when I'm deciding what to wear. I think I can handle it better in small doses. 

{in progress}

In addition I set aside a couple of boxes and stashed them on my top shelf. One has my winter/holiday clothing and one has clothing I'm not quite fitting into right now. It's been a rough year, guys. I'm not going to beat myself up about it, but there's a good 5 - 10 pounds standing between me and my usual jeans. I figure if I'm still here in another six months, I can just give the whole box away in one go. 

This isn't quite everything - my dresses are hanging in the coat closet but I sorted through them with the same system. 

So I didn't exactly achieve my goal (I have no idea how many pieces of clothing I still own) but I think I'm heading in the right direction. I'm going to see how it goes and hopefully I can make this an ongoing process over the next several months. I want to be in a place where getting dressed is easy and I'm happy with all my clothes. 

* Once I realized this it was nice because I mostly stopped shopping. But it's lead to the secondary situation I'm in now, where I've worn through every pair of everyday shoes and now I need to buy sandals, flats and sneakers and it's a nightmare, because I hate shoe shopping more than anything else.