IKEA

...I trust you all had a good weeked. Mine was very good, productive, even. I spent Saturday morning visiting garage sales with my mom. I love garage sales, unfortunatly, I didn't find anything worth buying. My mom bought some things, mostly little knick knacks here and there. I usually buy a lot of houseware-type-things but I didn't find anything.

That evening I went to IKEA with my sister, her boyfriend and my dad. I wasn't originally planning to buy anything, but IKEA is one of my weaknesses and I did end up buying things. (At least not as much as my sister, who spent $502 on a new closet-type-organizational system.)

Okay, bit of background on the situation- I have a closet. It's tiny, compared to the crap-load (yes, it's a crap-load) of clothes I own. Needless to say, I don't have enough space on my single horizontal bar to hold them all. I went and bought some of those vertically-hanging mock-shelves from IKEA which are, in concept a good idea. My problem is, I don't fold things. I barely hang things up. Thus, quickly I find that all my clothes end up on the floor. When I ran out of things to wear, I would gather up everything from the floor, wash it, and then leave it in the laundry basket to wear again. Thus the cycle continues. It wasn't working. Remember how I am messy? Yeah...

I remember seeing an add for those Rubbermaid 'Closet in a box' systems (you can check them out here) and thought that they would be a good idea. Just hand the vertical and horizontal bars, put up the shelves and ta-daa! Since I am not incredibly handy (i'm a little handy, I can paint and nail things...and do some measuring...) I thought their concept of making things as fool proof as possible were a good idea... until I saw the price tag - $169 for the 3'-6' basic system!! The hell I was going to pay that much for 'easy.' Boo.

So, instead, I went to IKEA. Good 'ol IKEA. And there, I bought 3 vertical hangy-things (see? told you i'm not handy), three planks of wood, 6 brackets, 3 poles and came home and went to work. Total cost? $79.49. Time spent? A good 3 hours. And I now have a fully functional 2 tier closet organizational system that leaves me lots of space to hang all mah junk. I'm very pleased that my cheapness payed off.

So I spent Sunday morning demolishing hanging parts on my old closet and putting in the new ones. Sunday afternoon was spent cleaning the room and putting things back in their place.

I'm hoping that with this closet system I can stay better organized in the future. My clothes are really the biggest source of my mess. I tend to come home, change into my jammies and leave all my other clothes on the floor. It's a bad habit, and one I need to break.

Wish me luck!