31 Days to Clean: The $3 solution

First off, you should know what the problem was. It boils down to this: storage space. This house has SO much more closet space than our old house. (It has actual closets). It is fantastic to have a good place to put things away. The problem is that there are no shelves in most of the closets, so they end up collecting junk (toys, clothes, coats, instruments, etc) and things disappear into the abyss that we know fondly as “the closet”.

Problem #2 – We have 2 dressers for 4.5 people. SO – we've got this nice set of built in shelves in the boy's room – I was stacking clothes on the shelves for a long time, trying to keep them organized, and trying to keep the boys out of them. It did not work well – they are toddlers – they like to remove clothes and toys from shelves.

Some friends gave us 2 beautiful tall shelves that they had been using for homeschool storage. We (I) chose to make poor Mr. Crum help me drag one upstairs so I could use it for Cracker's clothes. (I put Monkey's clothes in the small 3 drawer dresser that my mom had given us when he was tiny). It worked fantastically for holding clothes – BUT – I have kids... they like to pull things off of shelves, AND they discovered that this shelf was particularly fun to climb or hide in.

Back to square 1. We have been hunting for a dresser for a while. In fact, we had gotten 1 from Mr. Crum's wonderful sister, but it did not work to take it up the stairs to their room and it did not fit in our room. We have searched Craigslist for months (when we thought about it) to no avail. This weekend we went driving and hunting for garage sales. I took some cash with us, because I fully intended to find a dresser that would work.

We did not find a dresser.

THE SOLUTION: At a particularly high priced garage sale we found a stack of plastic shelving. You know, the kind that people use to store things in their basement or garage to get it out of sight? This variety stack of shelves had a label that told us it was not so high priced as some of the other items. In fact, this whole stack of shelves was only $3. We bought it.

We took the shelves home and cleaned them very thoroughly. I put them together as they got clean. For $3 we had bought 2 sets of shelves that are each about 6 feet tall, with 5 shelves on each one. The narrower shelves fit perfectly in the side of the now emptied closet in the boy's room. Guess what – their clothes fit on the shelves! I could not use all 5 shelves though, so I stood 1 on the floor for holding shoes – and their box of stuffed animals fits perfectly underneath!

Hooray!