How (not) to organize your closet

I am married to a Marie Kondo nut. Ten years ago, he took a week off work and went through the house top to bottom, in what we decided to call a “crap-ectomy.” I was under the gun at work that week (and even if I hadn’t been, I would have pretended to be), so he piled old towels and bed-linens in the hallway, scratched-up vases and utensils in the kitchen corners. All I had to do was look over the piles, pick out the few things I wasn’t yet ready to toss, and wave a vague blessing over the rest. He took carloads of toys and games to the local Take-It-and-Leave-It table at the dump; he hired a company to haul away five truckloads of other stuff.

For the next couple of months, he insisted on escorting dinner guests down to the basement to witness his empty, spotless basement. Then the inevitable happened: his daughter moved into a shared apartment and needed somewhere to store her boxes from college. So did a friend of hers. And there was all that free space down there. . . .

Since then, we’ve done a couple of smaller crapectomies. I hate the process but enjoy the result, so I play along with it. (Which mostly that I lavishly encourage and praise him from my favorite reading chair.)

Last spring, I retired. Although I had spent a month sorting through papers at work, I still brought home five plastic tubs of files and seven boxes of books. The books were easy to manage: We bought a lovely cherry bookcase for the bedroom, and I happily arranged my favorite teaching novels on the shelves. Those tubs of files, though . . . . In desperation, I crammed my collection of “comfort”/“bathtub” books into one corner of the closet in my study and shoved the ugly plastic tubs beside them. Then I firmly closed the door.

For months, I managed not to think about the contents of my closet. But with the arrival of COVID-19, I was suddenly housebound, with no trips to take and no trips to plan. It required more and more determination to ignore the state of that closet.
Reluctantly, I decided it was now or never. (Never seemed like a perfectly fine option.)

Stage One: Well Begun is Half Done (or so they say)

Here’s how I started the project. Once every week for the past month, I would open the bifold closet doors and stare at the mess in there. I would chew my lip for a few minutes as I mulled over where to start. With every appearance of moving decisively into action, I would pick up a few books that were thrown higgledy-piggeldy on the floor in front of my flimsy folding bookcase. Then I would hold them uncertainly for a while before sighing heavily and restoring them to exactly the same place they’d been before. I would frown as I imagined how heavy those tubs of files were and how messy my study would be during the organizing process. After sternly reminding myself that procrastination was not going to make this any easier, I would repeat the earlier picking-up-a-few-books move, followed by the putting-them-back-down-again move. After about fifteen minutes of this, I would close the closet door.

I do not recommend this as a process.

Yet it’s how I’ve always started difficult projects. And astonishingly, the difficult projects do get done. (Usually. Eventually.) I wrote a doctoral thesis this way, plus drafts of two complete novels. It’s inefficient and has probably left mental scars, but it’s the only way I can get myself to move forward.

Stage Two: The horror, the horror (as Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz whispers with his last breath)

Last week, under the pressure of self-induced guilt, I started sorting my books into piles by genre on the floor of my study. This was a serious prompt to action. After all, the piles were not only untidy, they were blocking access to the file cabinet where I keep my checkbook and credit-card statements. Next I hauled assorted piles of shabby clothes and boxes of photos off the top shelves. The clutter in my study was nearly unbearable.

Yet I bore it for another day. Two obstacles yet remained: 1) I needed a bigger bookcase, and 2) I did not want to peek into – let alone move – that stack of plastic tubs.

Stage Three: Piano pianissimo (an Italian phrase for “little by little”)

My husband – always willing to slave away in the service of neatness – helped me haul up from the basement two crappy but serviceable bookcases. I cleaned them, vacuumed the closet floor, and positioned them.

Then I started installing books. Putting the writing books here and the medieval literature there, separating my bathtub collection into subgenres (women’s fiction, romance, fantasy), gratefully greeting each of my bunged-up paperbacks – most many years old and many times read, some swollen from having been dropped into the bath water – and then organizing them on the shelves so that I could see them all at a single glance . . . . Well, I can scarcely describe the joy of it.

But the tubs remained.

To tackle them required a little more staring-and-despairing time. My teaching files were already organized, but other tubs contained jumbles of framed graduation photos from years past, funny little items students had given me over the years, and decorative objects from my classroom and apartment at school. Could I bear to throw any of these things out? If not, where were they going to go? I threw up my hands in defeat and went for a walk.

The next morning, fortified by sunshine and a good night’s sleep, I ordered hangers for the graduation photos and a box of hanging file folders. I sorted my various unpublished book projects into separate tubs. I tossed the memorabilia into another tub (without looking at it – so yes, I cheated a little). Then I labeled the tubs and carefully chose a place for each one. 

All of a sudden, I was done. It was done. I wondered for a moment if I had morphed into a Stepford Retiree but decided that I liked having a tidy, well organized closet. 

Stage Four: Voila!

Yes, there is still a certain amount of chaos in my study. But look at this closet! Even the Marie Kondo nut I’m married to is impressed. 

P.S. If the pictures don’t come through in the email form of this post, you can find photographic proof of my labors at my website.