Paint My House

Did anybody ever hear the joke about the prostitute who promises a "prospective client" that she'll do anything he requests for $50 as long as he can describe it in three words? He excitedly responds - "Paint my house."

If I had met that prostitute this weekend, I would have said "Organize my closet." Seriously. Believe it or not, the closet that we had in our temporary apartment home prior to buying our house was larger than the pathetic excuse that currently resides in our master bedroom. Mind you, the master bedroom is going to require massive renovations if we ever want to sell this house - and we realized that moving in. But I naively thought I could "make do" with the closet until we finally reached renovation time.

I was wrong.

I spent the entire weekend, and I mean 10:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, and 1:00 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, cleaning and reorganizing our entire master suite to create sufficient and accessible storage for our clothing and other paraphernalia - also known as "crap."

The good? I have at least 15 garbage bags of things ready to donate to charity.  The bad? We had 15 bags of expendable stuff cluttering up our space.  The ugly? Some of the stuff in those bags hasn't been worn for YEARS.

The problem I'm having with decorating this room is simple - it is all temporary. In other words, I don't want to commit a lot of time and money to the room until the renovations are done - even though that might not be for another year or so.  But I reached my breaking point, so recently I purchased new sheets, new pillows, a new duvet and new duvet cover, new dust ruffle, new shams - well, you get the picture - so it truly was redecorating and cleaning weekend in the casa.  And I'm exhausted.

Here are some of the main points of the overall "temporary" decorating scheme:

Want to see some very scary before and after pictures of our tiny closet?  THE HORROR!!!

BEFORE:

Notice all the flio-flops and sandals?  Yea, I hadn't even unpacked our winter clothes yet.  So I packed up the summer frocks, unpacked the winter sweaters, etc. and reoganized the whole thing. (I even gave my husband MORE room than he originally had - I know, I'm a saint).

AFTER:

Impressive, no?

I feel I must share a product that I was introduced to on Saturday at Bed, Bath and Beyond from someone I can only assume owns too much clothing (she explained that she had purchased over 300 of these little miracle).

***(Please note that I wasn't compensated in any way for this review - I simply heard about the product, walked back to the aisle where they were kept and purchased the last two boxes with my own hard-earned money).

Although the woman in line ahead of me suggested that I only purchase the original Huggable Hanger sold by Joy Mangano of "Miracle Mop" fame, I opted for the cheaper version "Slimline" that was on sale for $27.99 for a pack of 50.

Need I say more:

(Yes, they are grouped by color - I'm anal!)

Well, 2010 has been busy already....

I hope that everyone had wonderful holidays! I have many stories to tell - about our travels afar - and the holidays, but I'm slammed with work as a result of being out of the country.  I will right more tomorrow, but I had to share this picture that I came across while uploading my photos.  It brings me a lot of peace.