As I have been decluttering, I have been able to remove larger items from our house like bookshelves and create more open space. I have also been repurposing furniture around the house, trying to get creative and not buy anything new. Here is how I found new uses for decluttered bookshelves.
Dining Room Open Shelves
I mentioned that I had some ideas for how to use the decluttered bookshelves in other practical ways around our house in an earlier post. Once our two IKEA bookshelves were emptied of books, I moved one to the dining room and one to my youngest son’s closet.
One of the bookshelves used to be in the living room:
The old use of bookshelf 1
The other one was being used in my youngest son’s bedroom for books and the turtle’s tank was on top of it:
The old use for bookshelf 2
This is how we stored our dishes before:
And here is how it looks now:
I have been decluttering my kitchen cabinets regularly and there was space to move a lot of what was in the old dining room china cabinet into the kitchen cabinets. The china cabinet served us well for many years, but I didn’t realize how much space it took until we removed it from the room. I put it on our neighborhood listserv for free and it was taken that day. The top of the china cabinet and underneath it were also major clutter magnets. The two baskets were bought new at IKEA to store the kitchen towels, cloth napkins, and some other rarely used dishes.
Dresser with Bins
My youngest’s son’s clothes were being stored in this hanging sweater (?) thing. It worked while he was a baby and a toddler and I was picking out his clothes and dressing him, but now that he is a preschooler, I knew I needed another solution.
Clothing Storage Before
He wants to dress himself and he had to climb on top of things to reach some of his clothes. I have seen other families use shelves like these with bins for clothes or toys. We went to IKEA together and he chose the colors of his bins. One is used for his uniform clothes during the week, one has his underwear, socks, and pajamas and the other two have his tops and his bottoms.
Clothing Storage After
This has really helped him grow in his independence. Everything is at the perfect height for him and organized in a way that makes it easy for him to get dressed. There is still decluttering that needs to happen in the kids’ closets. I have been trying to remind myself that the goal is progress, not perfection.
Anyone else repurposing things that have been decluttered?
This post was shared at these fun and fabulous link parties: Monday Madness, Two Uses Tuesday
I am grateful for your continual reminder, not only to yourself but to a lot of us sisters (are brothers out there working on this too?!) that the goal or objective is “progress, not perfection”. Being grateful for the grace of progress–movement, change–no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, is a huge personal calmer-downer for me. Conversely, to be NOT grateful for this grace would be not very respectful to the Giver of the grace…
…thanks for your pictures!! Fantastic to SEE what is going on…I love it.
Thanks Peg.
I also appreciate the reminder that the goal is progress not perfection, but it’s hard to think that way when I’m trying to prepare a house that I hope some buyer will think is perfect. But slow and steady does win the race. The piles of items that are gathering for our yard sale this weekend attest to that.
Also I love that new set up for your dishes in the dining area! It probably makes a big difference in your enjoyment of that space!
It’s been funny to me that I *have* been finding new purposes for storage areas when we are about to leave this house. For instance, I moved my shoe rack to a completely different closet when I was decluttering clothes. After all this time, I think that move will actually keep me from ending up with all of my shoes in a big pile on the floor because I would never put them back in the old closet. It wasn’t so much that I had decluttered everything out of the closet and now had space for shoes, but that I finally admitted that the way I was storing my shoes was not working. I’m also repurposing my camp desk from a catchall of personal items to an actual place for stationary and files, since the number of paper files we are keeping is quite small. I’m trying to make sure that we keep enough empty bookshelves though, since we likely will not have built in bookshelves in our next place.
Thanks for keeping up with the posts!
Thanks for sharing your progress Susannah! I’m finding slow and steady making a big difference here too.
This is the exciting part for me. When decluttering has a visual impact and things almost organise themselves because there’s space and shelving for them. You’ve made huge inroads and it looks great.
Thanks Stella! I agree, it is very encouraging to see a visual change in the space