If you saw my bedroom last weekend, you would think that I was a complete slob. My room was a junky mess overrun with clothes and shoes all over the place. I was tired of the mess (and tired of my mom nagging me about it). I was tired of my room period. My room has been the same since we moved in when I was 15. So needless to say it was way past due for an update.
BEFORE. A big mess.
There were a number of different problems in my room that needed to be solved with this makeover.
1. Organize my shoes. I have over 40 pairs of shoes and it is difficult storing them all. I used to stack them in their boxes on the shelf in my closet. The boxes stacked up to the ceiling and with no light in there, it was hard to see. And I don’t know how many times those boxes have fallen on me when I try to get a box from the bottom of the stack. And whatever shoes couldn’t fit or didn’t have boxes were just strewn about. I was tripping over them all the time.
2. My bookcase was stuffed with books some of which I had not read in years.
3. A big, cumbersome chair that I hardly ever used except to hang clothes on.
4. No room in my closet to hang my jeans. The bulky jeans on hangers took up too much space.
For all these problems, I had a very simple solution. Firstly, I wanted to use 2 tall narrow bookcases from IKEA. One for my books and one for my shoes. Thus freeing up space on my closet shelf allowing me to put my jeans and sweaters there. Next, I would take out the chair. It took up too much space to not fulfill any purpose. It would also prevent me from throwing clothes on it. And I would remedy the dark closet situation by attaching a battery-operated work light to the ceiling of my closet; I can turn it off and on when I need to.
Before I went to IKEA, I made to sure to measure the wall from the foot of my bed to the open door of my closet: about 4 feet. Once at IKEA, I found the Billy bookcase and saw that it came in a number of widths. I saw the narrower one (about 16″ wide) close up and realized that it was not going to hold all my shoes. So I bought that one for my books and got a wider one (about 3′) for my shoes. It is a perfect fit against my wall. And they are super tall, taller than me, so I can fit more things on them.
After building the cases and before I put my shoes and books on them, I went through and set apart the ones that I have not worn or read in years to give away.
AFTER. Much better.
I am going to need to buy another shelf (about $10) for the empty spot on the fourth row of my shoe-case because as you can see, my shoe-case is full. And i am expecting more shoes to be delivered any day now. But I have a backup plan. I can take more books off the bookcase (especially the Harry Potter ones) to make room for more shoes. Or I can get another narrow case and put it next to my desk.
So yeah. I’m not sure why it took me this long to fix all this. Probably because I am what I like to call a lazy neatfreak… But I finally did it and I love my room now. It looks so clean and a little more grown up. And I can’t tell you how much easier it is to get my shoes off the shoe-case rather than the safety hazard that was my shoe-shelf in my closet. I still need to go through all my things and get rid of more stuff I don’t want. And another thing I would like to do is repaint. My 15-yr old self chose the red to be cool and creative. But my 24 yr old self is seeing that with the lack of natural light, it just makes my room look really dark. Painting and cleaning and putting together bookcases would have proved to have been too much for one weekend. I’ll paint later, maybe.
I really like doing stuff like this; using my hands, doing things by myself. I want to start doing more DIY projects and putting them up here on the blog. Stay tuned.
Until next time,
Elayna
The Junoesque 