Designed to Sell Part 2

I decided to put my condo on the market last month, and since then I have been channeling my Grandma Valeria. And my mom. What does this mean, you might ask? I have been cleaning like a mad woman. Seriously. I bet I have spent at least 20 hours cleaning out closets & putting things in storage in an attempt to make my 690 square foot condo appear more spacious. And if it doesn't work, the organization will be good for me.


I live in this tiny space, but collect things like I live in a 4,000 square foot home. Some habits have been picked up along the way, some habits I acquired from my parents. For instance, every time I buy a pair of shoes or get some checks in the mail, I keep the box so that I will have something to wrap presents in. My parents did this but had a crawl space to store the boxes in... Yah, I don't. And newsflash - the number of pairs of shoes I buy each year (let's not assign a number, it's not pretty...) does not equal the number of gifts I give/presents I ship each year. I didn't count but I am going to guesstimate that I had upwards of 30 shoe boxes in my closet. In addition to holding onto these shoe boxes, I also hold onto shopping bags. They come in handy when packing for a trip home, but criminy, I had way too many. Seriously. See the photo below.




It's official. I am a bag lady. I did find some nice 'vintage' bags - like from Marshall Fields (dang, I miss that store. Macys sucks!!)

So a lot of what I have found in my closets has been thrown away or donated to goodwill. This is just part of the pile o' stuff!

I actually have enjoyed cleaning out my closets. When I was in high school, my mom could always tell when I was going through a break-up or about to go through one, as I'd start going through my closets, organizing them & purging them of things I no longer wanted/needed. I've been through a few break-ups since moving into this condo but no longer use the 'closet cleaning coping strategy'.

All the hard work has paid off though and the results are very striking (in my opinion). My bedroom closet went from this

and this

To this

and this

Ok, so I won't bore you with more pictures of all the closets/cupboards/etc. I'm getting close to being done (I think). My goal is to list my condo by Feb 1st... I am out of town the next 3 weekends so we'll see how that all works out!

Oh, and am I the only person who has A LOT of stuff in their cupboards/fridge that are past their expiration date? Seriously - I bet I threw away an entire garbage bag of stuff...