I’m going to have a few posts on how we fit into our quite-large-for-a-one-bedroom apartment but still a one bedroom apartment not a three bedroom house.
When it comes to tight spaces, I am a-ok with squeezing in. I think it comes from my large family. I’m quite use to no privacy and sharing bathrooms. Growing up, we had six people (seven when my grandma moved in) living in a three bedroom, one and a half bathroom house. That’s tight.
A one bedroom apartment with one other human and a dog. That’s no where near tight.
However, the downsizing is still a struggle. We made several LARGE donation trips to Goodwill and still filled a 24 foot moving truck.
FILLED.
Did you get that? Dan, me, and George FILLED the truck behind us in the photo below.
AND we had a friend helping us pack who used to work for a moving company. That truck was very well packed. In fact, if he hadn’t helped, we would have had to make two trips.
Where did we get all of that stuff?? We have no kids, no toys, no extra bedroom furniture, and no extra dressers or clothes. We did have two living spaces so two couches, but holy cow, SO much stuff!
This could get me off on all kinds of other tangents about American society and all the junk we have, but I’ll save that for another day. Let’s just say I consider myself fairly minimalistic (not completely, but I try to only keep the things I use), and I was still completely blown away by how much stuff we had.
I’m a tad ashamed.
Moving on.
Today, I’m going to show you the walk in closet in our bedroom. It was the first area I tackled to organize because we couldn’t get dressed in the morning. 
I also only had one pair of shoes available. If you know me at all, you know that just doesn’t work. I love my shoes, and I wear a different pair almost every day of the week.
What? I like variety.
The floor plan to give you an idea of where we are talking about in this mansion of ours.
Before we moved in:
After everything was shoved in the apartment:
Sorry, it’s a little blurry. There was a lot going on that day. The above picture actually looks good because I moved two boxes so I could just take the picture (shown at the bottom of the photo).
Here’s the after:
Ok, ok, I know it has a TON of stuff in it, but isn’t it a huge improvement?
Please tell me yes!
Here’s the organization:
The left side of the closet…
The back wall of the closet…
The right side…
The underside of the closet…
Aren’t you so glad I showed you all that detail?? Ha, I know things no one wants to know, but I’m pretty proud of getting everything in there, so there.
A couple things of note in our closet:
- I have a lot of shoes. I do. It’s true. I love them all, and I wear them all.
- I DO wear them all because I donated all the ones I didn’t before we moved. I’m sorry to say I donated upwards of 15 pairs of shoes.
- We have a lot of blankets and an air mattress just in case someone wants to come stay in our cozy apartment. Somethings in life just don’t make sense.
And that is our closet.
The End
Catching up on all your posts…
#1, the latest My Story post had me choked up. I love you, Em!
#2, your 800 SF apt pictures are inCREDible. You guys had your work cut out for you! I’m impressed by what you did. It’s so true about how we accumulate stuff. I gave away a ton of my closet at our last move and was shocked by how few clothes/shoes I was actually using!
#3 love your shoe collection. It doesn’t even look that big, with it so neatly put away. Nice job! Bet Tobin wishes I would make my pile o shoes look so neat.