Spring Snow and A Closet Project

Happy April everyone!  Here in our part of North Carolina, we received our April Fool's Day "joke" on April 2nd.  It snowed here yesterday.  Yep.  Saturday it was 72 degrees and sunny, and yesterday (Tuesday) it was low thirties and snowing.  I guess I should say it was a "wintry mix" as our meteorologists charmingly refer to this combination of rain and snow.  By 5:00 p.m., the sun was back out and the sky was a perfect blue. 🙃    

   I took this picture from our front porch around lunch time yesterday; the snowflakes didn't really show up in the picture, but you can see it's wet out there.   

  

   My pansies have even more blooms now.    

   I hope I can get them to last until May when it will be time to plant summer annuals.   

      I've been working on a new project here.  It's not one of those glamorous, magazine-worthy projects that readers will be pinning.  But it's a big deal to me, because I've needed to get this done for quite a while.  Getting started is always the hardest part for me.  This is the linen closet in our hall bathroom.     

     Keep in mind, this house was built in 1971, but even so, the closet really is bigger than it appears in these pictures.  What a mess -- am I a domestic goddess or what?  😏   

   Anyhoo, with the exception of the shelf at the bottom of this picture, these are before images of my project.  Looking at this picture and the previous one, you can see that the closet was a disaster.  These shelves should hold a lot of stuff, but they need to be organized and utilized more efficiently.  Oh how I have dreaded doing this and have put it off for months now, so last Friday, I took the plunge.   

   This shelf with the canned goods and other food items was the first shelf I emptied.  It was filled with a mishmash of stuff, so I removed everything, threw away what I could, and put the rest in another room until I was ready to put it back in the closet or to store it somewhere else.  I  remember talking to my mom on the phone years ago, and she was cleaning out one of her closets.  My mom is a super-organized person, but she made the mistake of taking everything out at once, and then when it was bedtime, she still had most of the items from the closet sitting out everywhere and she was too tired to deal with them by then.  I told my husband about that, and he suggested I just empty one shelf at a time, and deal with it before I started on another shelf.  Great idea!  😃    The reason for this shelf of food is that our pantry is very small, and it quickly fills up, then I end up with food items sitting all around the kitchen.  I felt like I should be able to utilize some of the space in this closet for extra food storage; as you can see, these shelves are pretty deep.  The first thing I did was to put new shelf liner on the shelf.  Next, we purchased the tiered, expandable shelves here on the left of the picture for canned goods.  I got them at Lowe's Home Improvement for a good price.  I would love to put one of these in our pantry, too, but I'm afraid it wouldn't fit there.   

   The bottom shelf holds some of the bulk items we buy at Sam's Club and Costco.  I'll probably re-do this shelf last, because it works okay as is, and most of these things will remain here.     

   I've mostly finished re-arranging the shelf above,   

   to look like this.  Ahhh -- much better.  :)   

   At one time, I had my towels in the vanity cabinet under the bathroom sinks, but I like this much better.     

   Here's the food shelf now.  I'll still need to do some tweaking, but this is a good start.   

  We also purchased this rack at Lowe's, and I'm still trying to decide what I want to put here.  I think these door racks are a great way to use what would otherwise be wasted space.   

   I still have two more shelves to organize, and then the space on the floor beneath the shelves, before I can mark this project finished.  Tomorrow, I'll be taking my mom for her one-month, follow-up visit with the surgeon who did her knee replacement.  She's hoping he'll tell her it's okay for her to start driving again.     Are you working on any projects at your house right now?  Maybe something more exciting than cleaning out closets?  😀  I've managed to visit a few of you, briefly, but I will be back around, I promise.  Thanks so much for taking time to visit here, and have a wonderful day!!   Blessings,