January Decluttering Project: Closet of Doom (update #3)

Of one my goals for 2017 is to give our home a deep decluttering. As I mentioned in my New Year's Goals post,  I want to take a room a month and really give it a good cleaning and decluttering. 

For January, I have chosen my nemesis-- the room/closet off of the bathroom. There is a small room off the bathroom that has become a catch-all storage room. It is a disaster so I have dubbed it the Closet of DOOM. 

Just a reminder, here is the before (taken from the bathroom door looking in, as I could not even walk into the room):

After spending an hour cleaning it during week 1 of January, the closet had transformed to this:

After week 2, the closet looked like this:

So this week, week 3,  the plan was to work on the clothes that were in the bins on the white shelves and hanging on the rods. The baskets and totes on the white shelves hold the clothes that my children can grow into or are for a different season (now they hold spring/summer clothes).I didn't take a before picture, but they were overflowing and disorganized. I took every piece of clothing out, sorted it according to size and then matched up shirts and shorts and only kept what I knew my kids would wear. There is now a basket for Jacob, one for Ben and one for Rebecca.

  
I also decided to tackle the hanging clothes in the closet. These are clothes that do not fit in the master bedroom closet (aka clothes Bill and I hardly ever wear). These are also Rebecca's dresses, as she doesn't have a closet in her small bedroom. Here is part of the before (on the right hand side of the hanging organizer is another whole area of Rebecca's clothes:

For this area, I was ruthless. If it was a duplicate it got put in the donate pile. There were dresses and skirts I had not worn in 5 or 6 years. They got donated. There were multiple dress shirts from Bill's management days at restaurants. I kept 2 short sleeved and 2 long sleeved shirts as his job (that he has been at for over 6 years) is now more casual. So many articles of clothing were put in the donate pile. I also got rid of the hanging organizer as Rebecca was stuffing her dresses in the slots instead of hanging them up. Now she has to hang them up!  Here is the after:

  
After my session, I have another huge load of trash bags to take to Goodwill. I am hoping to get them out of there this weekend at some point. 

Now, all I have left in the room is 5 or 6 totes that are behind the door that hold memorabilia and maybe more clothes. I know that there is a tote for each child that holds their first outfit, artwork I wanted to save for them, etc. Not sure what is in the other ones. This coming week, I am going to go through each one and remind myself to be ruthless and get rid of the excess. I can do it. I can see the light that is staring to shine in the closet of doom :-)