Cubicles within cubicles

Most people have closets... or some oddly-shaped little room that is used as a closet. Therefore, most people would know that junk accumulates in closets. It starts out innocently enough. You acquire some new 'thing' - but upon bringing it home discover that you haven't anywhere to keep this 'thing'. After it sits next to the refrigerator or on the kitchen counter for a month or so... You declare this new 'thing' clutter.. and move it out of sight - to the nearest closet - until you can find the right place for it. And the 'things' keep coming.. and you keep putting them out of sight... Until your closets are overflowing with 'things' that you have forgotten about. That's when those 'things' that were once 'clutter' become 'junk'.

Hurricane Katrina cleaned out our closets for us.

Most of you have probably never experienced sudden and prolonged emptiness of all of your household closet spaces. I can tell you that though it is an edgy and mildly uncomfortable feeling - there is also an undeniable sense of freedom that wells up from somewhere deep inside. I, for one, refuse to take this freedom for granted.

I simply can't bring myself to just fill those empty spaces of my home with unknown and basically useless junk. Instead, we have box upon box of unknown and basically useless junk stacked in every major room of the house... waiting... for something. I am not sure what it's waiting for - but I have a strong sense that it is waiting to be hauled out to the curb. I am tempted to take those boxes out unopened and stick a sign in front of them: "Take me! I'm yours if you don't value freedom from clutter!"

More likely though -- I keep these things in boxes while I prepare places - actual organized spaces - 'homes', if you will - for whatever items I do decide to keep. Whatever finds itself homeless in our home will simply have to be adopted out to a family who will love it.

Today's task was to prepare one of those spaces: the kitchen closet. The kitchen closet was an odd-shaped recess under the staircase with access from the kitchen (thus - the 'kitchen closet'). Before Katrina it housed everything from the kids' backpacks and old recipe books to broken toys and old computer keyboards. For the last 18 months it has been empty.

Our goal was to turn the closet into a space for our homeschool materials - and ONLY our homeschool materials. Given the nature of homeschooling, if we were going to pull this thing off we were going to have to find a way to make this little closet comfortable and organized all at the same time... Crawling over stuff with a flashlight searching for the math textbook is not the best way to start a homeschool morning.

We went out and bought two ClosetMaid cubicle kits and assembled those for the side wall beneath the coat hooks.

Emily inspects our handiwork.

That left us with the question of what to do with our copier. Prestorm we were keeping it on the kitchen counter with the intention of eventually finding a good place for it... So it only followed that it was going to end up in the kitchen closet like everything else that spends a lot of time on the kitchen counter (see above) -- BUT this time.. we wanted to do it RIGHT. Our original plan was to have Dean build a shelf at the back of the closet (we had already had electrical outlets installed in the closet in anticipation of this)... However, once the shelf was in place we discovered that the walls were so far out of square that the shelf looked horribly slanted -- no matter how actually level it was. The solution? We had Dean remove the shelf (we now need to repair the damage to the walls.. again) and went out to buy a mobile printer cart that would fit in the back of the closet. This actually turns out to be much more practical as it would be fine to make copies right there in the closet -- but when the copier needs to be used as a computer printer... we can just roll the printer to the computer.

Yes - it's dark... that's because the printer cart happens to be black...

Voila! A totally functional space for books and school supplies!!! Let freedom reign!