Six Items Or Less

Even if (when!) I make the basement at Taylor into the perfect, beautiful laundry room, there's still not much space to store clothes. I believe I can fit in 3 or 4 freestanding clothes rods but, if a family were living here full time, that still might not be enough hanging space.

I was actively contemplating this issue when I heard about a challenge and a blog called "Six Items Or Less".  The challenge is to wear only six items of clothing for 30 days. You can see the rest of the explanation and the rules at http://www.sixitemsorless.com/ if you'd like.

This sounded like my kind of challenge - after all, I'm the one who challenged myself to do this house for free, right? So I started pondering. The prospect of only six items of clothing seemed terrifying at first. Have you even been on a trip and gotten just SICK of your clothes? But it was late July at the time and my wardrobe was very pared down already due to heat.

As I thought it through, I realized that six DRESSES could be a lot more versatile than, say, two pair of pants and four tops, for example. I chose six summer dresses: A short brown sleeveless v-neck, a long pale pink, a long black sleeveless, a short black chiffon with little white polka dots, a short black sleeveless with tiny ruffles at the neckline, and a short black and white graphic print.  (Sorry this is not a better photo but it was 6 a.m., I didn't have sunlight to work with yet, and I was too impatient to wait for it!)

I wore these six dresses with three pair of shoes (one brown, one casual black, and one dressy black) for most of August. And I loved it! I looked forward to the ease of getting dressed every morning. I usually knew, instintively, exactly which dress I wanted to wear before I even got out of bed. And I liked each of them enough that I didn't get tired of them. This minimal wardrobe also made packing to go to Enid for the weekend a breeze - throw two dresses and two pair of shoes in a big purse and go! My experiment was a smashing success!

Now that it is autumn, I am hating that I have to come up with other things to wear. I miss my six dresses!

I am always freezing in the cooler months so I'm not sure I could get by on just six items in seasons other than summer. However, I think maybe 9 items might suffice: a pair of jeans, a pair of black pants, a black long-sleeved t-shirt and a white long-sleeved t-shirt, a long brown velvet shirt, my favorite green mini-cableknit cardigan, a brown jacket cardigan, a black velour knit cardigan, a pale pink angora cardigan. I think I might try that for November. Stay tuned for photos and feedback!

Closet Crisis

In 1915, people didn't own many clothes.  The closets of the time attest to this fact quite vividly!  Clothes were either store-bought and expensive or handmade which was time-consuming.  Either way, there were fewer of them!

True to their day, the closets at 419 S. Taylor are miniscule.  They are even smaller than what one would normally think of as a "small closet" (those 1920-1960 models).  The two original bedrooms have identical closets that look like this (don't miss the peek at the quaint vintage wallpaper before it runs into the ugly panelling that covers access to the bathroom pipes!):

Both closets are about 7 feet wide but only 18 inches deep -- so shallow, in fact, that you can't hang clothes from side to side like you would in a regular closet.  A clothes hanger is about 17 inches wide so, once you add clothing to it, you'd be rubbing the sides of the closet.  Instead, in these closets, the clothes must be hung in each of the little side alcoves from front to back in that 18" depth.  This allows for about 12 items of clothing on each side.  With some creativity, it is possible to squeeze a few more clothes in here and there but, basically, these closets are completely inadequate for modern humans. 

The middle bedroom had another closet that someone (who still couldn't be called a clothes horse!) built out of 2x4's and paneling.  But it was too ugly for words.  So I took it out.  Actually, I started to take it out but, when I lacked the strength (aka "man power"), Mark happily stepped in for me and had a great time tearing it down in about 2 1/2 minutes flat!

The closet in the sunporch master bedroom is even worse.  Since the sunporch as been used as a laundry room for much of it's life, the closet is, essentially, a broom closet.  It measures 24 inches wide and 28 inches deep.  Spacious for brooms, yes, but it doesn't even seem worth it to try to hang clothes in it.
The picture below is all doors but the closet is the second from the right -- behind the open, unpainted hollow-core bathroom door.

Never fear, however, because one of my favorite mental exercises is to try to solve the spacial and functional problems in a house!  I have it all figured out! 

The partial basement has two rooms.  One will be a bedroom for the boys when I can finish it out.  The other is about 9 x 15 and has laundry hookups (I realize now that I have never even taken photos of the basement.  I'll add them in when I can so check back!).  This will be both the laundry room and the "family closet".  The bulk of everyone's clothing can be kept here.  The closets upstairs can be used for immediate clothes storage without having to pack them to bursting!

Several years ago I became enamoured with the concept of an "Everything Closet" that I learned about in a wonderful book called A Place For Everything: Organizing the Stuff of Life by Peri Wolfman and Charles Gold.  Wolfman and Gold show a master closet that is also the laundry room. This concept makes so much sense to me because I've spent decades hauling laundry up and down stairs and to and from the laundry room.  I even put in a new UPSTAIRS laundry room in my Fayetteville house and turned the downstairs laundry room into a little office.  This was after years of throwing the dirty clothes from the second floor down to the front hall to be sorted and hauled to the laundry room only to have to lug them back up when they were clean. Why not just have it all in one place?  Here are a couple of photos of pages from the book so you can see their version:

I've expanded on the "everything closet" concept in a house plan I designed (but haven't built - yet!) in which the upstairs laundry room adjoins the master closet (and other closets as well, if configured carefully) so that it is close but everyone else's clothes don't end up in mom and dad's closet.

My inspiration for the laundry room at Taylor comes from this magazine spread (Country Home, March 2006):

Isn't it glorious?  This room just makes me HAPPY!  I could look at it all day.  I could live in it.  I could die happy there (but not for another 60+ years because I'm nowhere near done yet)! 

By the way, the laundry room at Taylor looks a lot like what this laundry room looked liked before (see below).  Very basementy!

I hope to post equally dramatic before and after pictures of MY basement laundry room when I'm done with it! 

I can't believe I just wrote a whole piece on ugly, empty closets and a creepy basement laundry room.  But maybe, just maybe, seeing the dingy, boring, uninspiring "before" will give you a greater appreciation when you finally get to see the "after"!  In the meantime, you can spend every waking moment anticipating it!  Oh, wait a minute, you're probably not as obsessed with my laundry room as I am.  Well, anyway, I'm entertaining myself even if I'm boring YOU!