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The Closet Master

My closet. One more time.

Hello! Does this stuff look familiar? It's my closet. Only different. See, here's what our bedroom looked like yesterday.

Yeah, things have changed since our last check-in, but those things will happen. But here's the room today. Can you spot the difference from yesterday to today?

Out with the foot bench, in with the closet! That's the wood grain thing you can spot on the left in the picture above. Here's a better angle.

The new closet- Ikea Askvoll.

So why the switcheroo, especially so soon after total closet domination? I mentioned that we have a pretty intense game of musical chairs starting up over here to convert the current office into a nursery. Step one of that game is this new wardrobe - two Ikea Askvolls ($99 each) side by side. Right now, or I guess until now, as I've mentioned, we've had no closets in our bedrooms. So we had set up a sort of dressing room in the back hallway - where the closets were.

The first closet on the left, which is curtained off, is Bret and Lou's. The second was, until yesterday, mine. Then Bret and I share the dresser on the right, and the leaning ladder shelf is home to my jewelry, hair dryer, and the steamer we never use but could some day.

All this has worked, well, fine. But the reason that a new master closet is Step One in the apartment overhaul is actually two-fold. First, this area in the hallway is going to turn into the office. The desk will take the place of the dresser, and the leaning ladder shelf and my old closet will hold office and craft supplies. The dresser we're using here will get moved to the kitchen, and our current kitchen "island" will become little guy's dresser and changing table. Still with me? So starting with a closet in our room allows us to clear out my old closet and start moving office things in there, which in turn allows for the transfer of nursery items from its current place to the nursery (Baby stuff is currently in what we call it the baby closet, but it should be called the closet from hell, and it's the last closet on the left in this same hallway, past the door jamb, and so not visible in these photos).

Reason number two was that this dressing room situation wasn't really doing it for me anymore. I tend to get dressed right here in the hallway - it's where everything is - and I've been walked in on, mid-maternity-tights-hike-up, more than once. I feel responsible for the burned retinas of the poor walkers-in, and eager to avoid the situation further. I'm really, really glad to have a room with a door where all my clothes are. I moved the stuff the dresser was holding (mostly undergarments) to my bedside dresser, which used to hold linens. Now the hallway closet hold those. Not everything has been smoothly transitioned: These little wardrobes don't quite equal the hallway closet in size. I'm still figuring out how I'll store the rest of my shoes and jewelry, and Bret's stuff, which remains in the hallway dresser..so the work has really just begun. But then, we knew that when we started. Or at least, I did. Bret looks a little dazed.

Will you stick with us as we seriously move things around IN EVERY ROOM? I'm kind of stoked about it, when I'm not feeling overwhelmed, and I think you'll really like some of the changes we're making. I do. But, I do have a scheduling note. Starting this week, I'm going to post three times per week, instead of my current aspirational five. My hope is that scaling back on the posts will allow for higher quality posts, more time to build my readership, more time to hang with Lou, and more time to stockpile posts ahead of baby's arrival in May. I haven't decided how much time I'll take off from the blog post-baby, but I'm hoping that by scaling back now, I can minimize it. I love writing this blog, and I hope you love reading it, so I'm looking to keep things going! Thanks as always for reading, and I'll see you Wednesday!