no skeletons

Raise your hand if you secretly wonder what's behind people's closed doors.  Yeah, me too.  Well, here's a revelation for those of you who wonder if my organizational obsession extends beyond prying eyes.  It just might--welcome to my hall closet.

Behind the door is our (currently bulging) collection of plastic bags for re-use.  Our cotton laundry bag hangs from the next hook.  So enthralling--oh me, oh my--bet you can't wait to see what's next!

The top shelf, which was playing host to a big spider for our first two days here--yipes!--now plays host only to three little stacks of bathroom linens.  I promise if you stay overnight and use one of the towels, no spiders will jump out at you.  The dearly departed one can be explained by the fact that we moved in almost a month after the previous tenant left, and lots of people were moving in and out of the building in the meantime.  In other words, lots of open doors in warm weather and one frightened arachnid seeking sanctuary in an empty unit.  But let's move on.

Our towels are holdovers from college, every sort of mismatch.  Sometimes I imagine thick, white cotton, lamenting the less-than-soft and far-from-color-coordinated set we own.  But you know what?  These get the job done.  I've got to practice contentment.  

The shelf below the towels holds stuff we use every day--or every week, at least.  Laundry soap & dryer sheets, perfume, Q-tips, bobby pins and ponytail holders, matches, a lint roller, and mouthwash take up the bulk of the space.  (Pardon the bag of bags poking its big self into the corner of the shot.)

Next comes a shelf of first-aid items, including the Reader's Digest Home Remedies book where I found the idea to try curing my cold by wearing wet socks, as mentioned in September's "Cradle of the Kitchen" post.  Anything to breathe during the night.

Now we're making our way toward the new home of the worn-out dish cloths you met in Friday's kitchen post.  You can see them peeking out from the next shelf. 

While we're zeroing in on minutiae, allow me to finally acknowledge the blue sticky notes affixed to every shelf.  During our move, when I was unloading boxes of all and sundry into the empty closet, I felt a bit overwhelmed at the options.  Which shelf should I devote to which products?  How would I know what to group together?

If you're thinking I should have just duplicated the layout of our old closet, you're partly right, except that here we have a medicine cabinet, and there we didn't.  So prime space that I used for makeup and deodorant in the old closet was open in the new layout, since those daily basics now had a place in the bathroom.  My solution was to label each shelf with a category name, sort the items from my box onto the corresponding shelf, then organize shelf by shelf.

It's not that I can't recognize what's what anymore; it's just that I've never removed those notes.  And somehow the Cleaning/Utility one got a little bleach on it.

Near the bottom lies the toilet paper.  That started out as a statement of fact and ended up as kind of a rude joke.  Anyway.  Also candles, and more candles, and more candles, an incense burner, and some plates and marbles for centerpieces.

Resting on the floor are the few, the proud, the vases that made the cut when I mercilessly purged.  I also spared a passel of glass candleholders my mom purchased for our wedding, partly out of respect for her effort and partly out of a conviction that filled with matching candles they'll look awesome en masse for the holidays.

Oh, this "shelf" (which is the floor) is also the place where I stash any hardware we change.  You can see I removed a towel rod from the bathroom.  Pretty soon I'll share the details of that little undertaking.  There's also an old thermostat sitting in a tub back there along with some screws and whatnot.  That way I know where everything is so I can put it back the way I found it when we leave.

There you have it: my sticky-noted closet sans skeletons, spiders, and dust bunnies.  I have no secrets from you.  Well, at least not when it comes to the contents of my home.