Washing Snow

I need to get better at taking before photos! By the time it occurred to me to take a before photo, I had already completely emptied the coat closet.

Cleaning out the coat closet in the living room has been on my to do list for a while. I've tweaked sections of it here and there, but the last big cleanout of that closet was probably five years ago. This time I decided to completely empty the closet, because I wanted to clean out enough stuff to be able to store the 8 ft folding basting tables in this closet. 

No before photos, but here's the after photos.

After talking it over with DH, he opted to store the helmets we use for the grandkids upstairs in his office. There wasn't anything on the top shelf in his office closet, and since he doesn't take the grandkids riding all the time, in the office closet is good enough. We went through all the coats and riding gear, and whittled it down to what he actually uses. I took out all the hangers not strong enough to hold the heaviest coat (he's got an armored leather jacket that weighs a LOT). We had a taller set of plastic drawers in here for his riding gloves, rain suit, etc... but this wider set that shorter holds more and allows for the coats to be hung directly over it. I got him to dispose of his old helmets, yes broken and damaged helmets can get thrown away, thank you! The two bags next to helmet stay, one is a first aid kit he takes riding, and the other holds club patches and stickers he takes on club rides. 

Here's the other side of the closet. After purging so much I easily had enough space for the two 8 ft folding tables, the leaf from the dining table, and I can even fit the vacuum in here and get it out of my pantry! The milk crate on the shelf just hold extra helmet visors, and he's got a couple motorcycle covers up there. I told him he can actually bring the grandkid helmets back downstairs if he wants, since we got rid of so much. 

Going through a closet that hasn't been cleaned out in a long while reveals some odd things. We had a jacket with the tags still on it, that fits NO ONE in the family! It's getting donated, so hopefully someone that it will fit will enjoy a new jacket at a used price. We had some other jackets that also fit no one, and we managed to re-home those to friends already.  

One thing from the closet was just relocated to the storage room, and it's more in my wheelhouse than DH's. It also led to the oddest household chore I did this week. 

When our kids were young, we lived in Missouri where winter snow was a regular thing. There are parts of Arizona that get lots of snow, but not right where we live. To offset the disappointment of not having snow, I invested in plush snowballs a few years ago, and every Christmas I take them out and we have a huge snowball fight. I kept the box with the "snowballs" in the coat closet, but when I took the box out I realized it was barely holding together. When I opened the box, I noticed all the snowballs were covered in sidewalk chalk. So, my oddest chore of the week was washing two batches of snowballs in the washing machine!

They are all white again, and ready for this holiday season. The twins are already working on convincing me to get them out for Thanksgiving! It's not too hard of a sell ;-) The empty tote I stuck them in is bigger than I need, but it's fine for now. The broken cardboard box made its way to the recycle bin. 

I don't feel like I've gotten much done on the sewing front. I do have all the blocks made for five of the quillows I need to make, just two more to make blocks for. I have one of the rag quilts down to the last five seams. Five seams to sew, sew around the edge and I'll have one finished. 

DH is getting his magazine ready to mail as I type, so hopefully, my new cutting station is soon to be a reality!!! I know part of the reason I'm having a hard time staying motivated to sew is because what I want to be doing is organizing my new cutting table.

I did some tweaking of my ironing station today, and moved things around a bit. I decided I didn't like the bias tape rolls there, so those got moved into the plastic drawers I took out of the coat closet. That's fair, since the plastic drawers I moved into the closet came from my fabric room! So the bias tape rolls are still in my sewing room, but in closed storage which I feel better about. For now, I moved some plastic bins I already had onto the ironing station shelves, but the bins aren't fitting on there to my liking, so we'll see what else I have around that could work better. It's still a good temporary solution, because I managed to clean off my thread cabinet, and I work better with uncluttered surfaces. 

It's funny, I can work on several projects at once, and easily keep them all straight, but if I have too much visual clutter, I start losing any desire to work on anything. As soon as I clean it up, I'm good to go again. I'm really a fan on project bins that aren't clear. If I'm looking at a colored bin on a shelf that's visually simple to me, but a clear bin where I can see a bunch of stuff in it is visually cluttered and I don't like it. I love busy scrap quilts, but those are finished. I think it's mainly unfinished things looking busy that overwhelms me. It must remind me I'm not sewing fast enough!