Jess Lively

First of all, thank you all so much for your feel better wishes. I’m feeling much better today and think that in a few more days I’ll be back to 100%.

Yesterday I had a few bursts of energy and made a surprising amount of progress.

One of the first areas I was keen to complete was the bedroom. Decorating aside, the room is mostly in it’s finished state. Clothes are put away, the shower curtain is up, and the dresser is filled.

Today I’m excited to share the area where I made the most progress: the closet. It is now Phase One complete. (Phase Two involves a drill and Mr. Lively’s handiwork.)

Because I cannot find my camera lenses tucked away in a box somewhere, these photos are all from an iPhone. So please ignore the fuzziness and so forth.

To start, I shall share the closet in it’s raw state.

To be honest, the closet didn’t come with a best friend and her fiance. It was empty. And this is the guest bedroom closet, which is actually a bit bigger than the master closet. But you get the idea, right?

It has nice bars and shelves, but still pretty bare.

Because our bedroom is a bit on the small side (9’9″ x 12″) we can only fit one dresser, one nightstand, and the bed in the room. Which means this 4′x5′ closet has a lot of storaging (yes, I just made that up) to do.

We debated about using the guest room’s closet as my closet or Mr. Lively’s. But it isn’t a super short walk between the rooms. And I don’t like the idea of putting on my pajamas in the guest room, or walking between the guest room and master to get ready for bed.

So we are maxing out the master closet as much as we possibly can.

Mr. Lively elected to have more dresser space so that I could have more of the closet storage. But even with this arrangement in place, I still have my pajamas in the nightstand drawer (I know, so weird), and I had no place for my t-shirts, tanks, and workout gear.

So I decided in my loopy/sick state yesterday to drag a big shelving unit into the closet.

Obviously, this was a fail. But the win here was that I dragged this all the away from the living room around two dozen boxes and managed it all by myself. In my sick state, that was a big win.

Then I tried a smaller shelving unit.

Better… but still blocking my pants and skirts.

At this point I tried it under my shirts and dresses.

It was looking good.

My short dresses are a bit bunched up on top of the shelf. But overall, it’s not so bad.

At this point I tested some baskets for the workout gear storage. Though I am fairly confident I can keep straight piles for the t-shirts and tanks, I don’t have much hope for the workout gear which is pretty much on the floor.

The workout gear looked pretty good in the baskets. But they were much smaller than the shelf size and were getting filled pretty quickly.

Then I remembered these guys…

The white metal bins were $18 from World Market a few years back and have served as cute Jess LC bins.

Success.

They are pretty, still allow for easy access, and don’t have any basket-y bits that could end up attached to my workout pants. Plus, they are larger and can hold more than the original baskets.

Other than the bins and shelves, we added a corner laundry basket that Mr. Lively picked out at Target. Since he is in charge of washing the clothes, he got to pick the container.

And there you have it. We have found a way to keep almost all of our clothes in a nightstand, dresser, and smallish walk-in closet.

Next up for this “little closet that could”… accessory storage.