Curing, Cleaning and Organizing: and a Project!

A dear friend and blog reader recently asked me if I was going to Spring Clean this year. For the past few years, I've taken on a two month project, modelled after the Cure by Apartment Therapy founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan.

I have been organizing my basement while also taking Aby Garvey's workshop, The Fundamentals of Getting Organized. (I'm also taking two scrapbook classes, so to say I'm keeping busy would be an understatement.)

So, without officially saying no, I have decided that it is doubtful I will be doing any Spring Cleaning, per se.

Nonetheless, it feels sort of like I already am.

The cure is structured around spending one week in one room of your house or apartment. (There are actually two Cures, as Gillingham-Ryam writes in his book of the same name. I'm talking about the "Whole House" version.) During that week, you not only clean, but repair broken things and assess how well the room is working for you. The latter, for me, is what is meant by "organizing." Do you have what you need where you need it to get the job done in this room? The "Spring Cleaning Cure" was an oppurtunity I took every year to do this assessment, clean the heck out of everything, and usually slap a coat of paint on something.

And, I'm doing that. But not, so far, in any methodical way. It is also important to me to do that, once a year. Check all the systems. Make sure everything is working the way it should. One thing that is most definitely NOT working is our closet in the Master bedroom. Yesterday, I finally did something about it.

Yesterday, I finally hung a new light in our Master Bedroom closet.

The original light in the closet was a long cord rigged up to a light socket with a pull chain. Someone had installed a hook in the ceiling and tied it up. The cord, however, ran through the ducts to my daughter's room at the other end of the house and plugged into one of her sockets. Why?

The light stopped working, I am ashamed to say, probably more than a year ago. But with only one pair of pants to my name and a couple of sweater coats which I kept in the closet, I didn't care.

But, I now have four pairs of jeans or so and only a few fit, but I couldn't find them in the dark closet. (Losing weight means hanging on to different sizes so you always have at least one pair to wear!)

I found this very cute lamp at the As Is department of IKEA last weekend.

It needed a part which my husband made for me.

Then, of course, I had to drill in a dark closet!

First, the wood into the wall (with anchors).

Then, the lamp into the wood.

But it worked. I elected to install the lamp up above the door so the glare from the light won't blind us. The shadows cast when I stand in front of it are fine.

Hubs said it was a "smart idea." That's high praise from that man!
Now, of course, I'm going to clean out this closet--and ask him to get rid of stuff--right after he drills me a hole through the wall to an outlet in our room.

Yes, the closet is yellow. And though I like the colour, you can't imagine how much I am itching to paint that baby white!