hallway closet crapalanche ... check!

So there once was a hallway closet ...

An ugly, frightening, stuffed to the gills hallway closet.  Small and over packed, it was difficult to find anything, and no one ever put anything back where it belonged.

And it drove me nuts.

When we got married and moved into this house we timed it well/horribly.  You see, ultimately to make a long convoluted story short and less boring, both sets of my grandparents were moving.  The process of moving into assisted living spaces meant that they had to clear out a ton of their things, and being that my husband and I were "just starting out" we were generously gifted with many of these things.  Problem was that only some of those things were the kind of stuff that make you go "oooh, this is cool" and the rest of it was just "old people's stuff."  But being broke has a funny way of equalizing things on the I Should Keep This scale.

Case in point, the hall closet.  I do not own a set of towels.  I own random, mismatched towels, many of which are older than my children (I have a ten year old, this is not a good thing!).  I have dish towels with flowers and geese on them, and I have like 40 of them.  I have more of those lovely afghans that grandmothers so lovingly knit than an afghan sweatshop. And somewhere in this closet there appears to also be a monster that eats flat sheets.  Because I can't find the damn flat sheets.

At any rate, I spent an hour pulling things out, throwing things out, and putting stuff in a box to donate (hellooo 100 Things Challenge!) and was left with less crap, but still crap.  But its crap I will use, as it is still useful and we can't go buy new towels for the bathrooms right now.  I did ditch the geese and flower dishtowels though.

If you use Pintercrack you may have seen this pinned at some point:

Its supposed to be this wildly simple-yet-oh-so-great way to store your sheet sets inside of the pillowcases.  Except I wanted to take scissors to the damn elastic thingies.  I wound up with this, after multiple tries.

And I was happy with that.

So after I had the closet all organized and cleaned out and tons of shit re-folded, I reminded myself that the last time I tried to straighten up in there it was a hot mess again in like 4 days.  So I decided to write a little love note to my family ...

Undoing over an hour of my time makes Mommy feel Stabby McStaberson, friends.  Lets keep that in mind.

Here is the oldest Minion reading the note .... he was appropriately alarmed.

So while it isn't "done" in the sense that I know it will be a mess again soon, it is better.  I think better is good.  I will need to come up with a better organization to it or just not allow anyone else to touch the darn thing (so not happening).

So on the list of things I want done around the house so I can feel like I am not a massive failure as a housewife I can scratch off "reduce crapalanche potential in the hall closet so I can get a damn towel out with out being buried alive."  Yes, it actually says that on my list.