December 2022 tiny projects challenge: Day 3

14 December 2022

For this tiny project, I turned my attention to winter coats and accessories. We store most of our winter wear at the top of our back steps. (We live on the second floor of a two-family home and my offices and the guest room are on the first floor.) There’s not a lot of space there and it’s just a 36” rod and shelf and no door. It’s not beautiful, but it is functional.

Except it was starting to get crowded.

Here’s a before photo:

I started with the coats. In just three feet of space, 23 coats were hanging. Fourteen of them were mine and nine were Barry’s. (I was so surprised I had so many!) I focused on my coats and very quickly sorted out seven that I wanted to keep, five that I wanted to donate, and two that I moved to the basement, just in case. That took about five minutes. Barry will go through his coats on his own (I hope).

Here’s how that rod looked after only five minutes of decluttering and another five minutes of moving the donations out.

Then I turned my attention to the hats, scarves and gloves that we store there. Some were in plastic shoe boxes (one sweater box and two large shoe boxes) on the shelf. I knew going in that I would be able to let go of a lot and that I should relocate anything I keep because I hadn’t opened those boxes in probably five years.

Here’s a photo of the shelf:

It was a simple thing to pull the plastic boxes onto the kitchen counter. The sweater was full of hand-knitted (by me) scarves. I took a look and my first thought was, “I can’t donate those. I made them.” And I put them right back in the bin. But I sat with it for a couple of minutes and realized that of course I can donate them. I’m not using them, nor will I. I can always make more (and, in fact, have). So I took all the hand knits except one and put them in the donate bag.

Then I sorted out the other stuff on the shelf, most of it my husband’s, and laid them out on the kitchen counter. (I moved the spray paint to the basement and kept the WD-40 there because that’s where we’d look for it.) On that shelf, there were three left gloves (go figure). We’re going to hang on to those in hopes of finding the corresponding right gloves downstairs. If we find the mates, we’ll donate two of the pairs. Barry let go of a few accessories and we moved a few things to the front door (a project for another day). (Since we walk Bix from the front door and go to our cars from the back door, we store different accessories in each place.)

Here’s a photo of the shelf when I finished. (Definitely a “good enough” finish line.)

But I wasn’t finished, because there were also three baskets of such accessories on the window sill.

On the windowsill, I found the hood and other accessories for one of the coats I was donating (it felt good to put them all together for donation). I also found a bunch of gardening gloves, which I’ll wash and store more appropriately, and a few hats. All I kept were the detachable hood from my current winter coat, the pussy hat I knit in 2017 and, for Barry, one scarf and one hat. I moved a sun hat to the shelf above the coats.

Here’s how the windowsill looked when I finished.

The second part of this project took about 20 minutes. The whole area feels much better and now we can easily put our hands on the items we use. Again, it’s a great reminder of what a half hour of focused decluttering energy can reap! I encourage you to give it a try.

Tagged with: coats, decluttering, tiny projects