It was a very large hair, let me tell you, because I am definitely a very lazy person. I hate rearranging the house. I hate cleaning up a very large mess. And Grace's closet was a very large mess, as I hadn't really done anything to it in the two years she's been on this planet.
At some point, I had bought this shelving unit thing from Target with the thought of organizing all of her clothes in the closet, which was right next to the changing table. Then her clothes started getting too large for the shelving unit, and she just had too many clothes to begin with. I bought a dresser from my neighbor J (whose birthday it is today... I told you I had a lot of December birthdays to buy for!) for Grace's room, which alleviated a lot of the need for the shelving unit.
It got to the point that the shelves were only being used for clothes Grace had outgrown. Today I got completely sick of looking at the mess and decided to do something about it.
Behold Exhibit A:
The parts of the closet you can't see are even worse. I only cleaned out two-thirds of the closet. That was plenty of work, let me tell you.
I pulled out the shelving unit and just stuck it beside the closet, next to Grace's dresser, to get it out of the way as I got everything out of the visible one-third of the closet. I couldn't believe how much CRAP I had packed into this small closet. It's insane.
You wouldn't believe the stuff I found either. Oh, hey! There are those pants that Caroline lent me for Grace!! I guess I'll have to send off a package to Caroline in a few weeks.
The more I looked at the shelving unit sitting next to the closet, the more I decided it would work there with toys piled into it. Before I'd had a laundry hamper sitting there with a ton of toys in it; now it looks at least a little organized.
Part of what I had to do to put the closet back together was to rehang the clothing rod. Kurt had taken out the little parts that hold the rod to the wall before he installed the shelving unit, so I had to find where he'd put them. Yes, I suppose I could have just emailed him, but I wanted to get it done NOW and it would have taken hours for him to have gotten my email. Chances are, he would have forgotten where he put them anyhow!!!
Luckily he tends to put things like that away in his workbench organizer, which is where I found the little rod-holder thingies.
Next step -- screwing them into the wall.
Now I'm pretty handy with a drill. But I have a tendency to strip the screws as well. That's precisely what I did today -- I chose a screw a bit too long (which worked in my favor, thankfully) and managed to strip the hell out of it. There was no way I was going to be able to back it out of the hole with the drill, so I found Kurt's needle-nose pliers and worked it out of the hole that way.
When all else fails, throw brute strength at it!
Then it was easy to screw everything back into the wall (although I did wish for Kurt's ambidexterity when I tried putting the one side of the rod holder in), attach the rod, and hang clothes from it. The last thing was just cleaning up the gargantuan mess I'd made all over Grace's floor.
Behold the end result:
Much better, don't you agree??
Now I just have to get my darn computer armoire organized... *sigh*