My birthday gift to my mom this year was a tiny, poorly handwritten set of cards with a mighty proposal on them: A list of cluttered or poorly organized spaces in her house that I would help her clear out and reorganize.

See my mom is just like me – doesn’t want to deal with the papers and sorting of things as they occur, because she’s too ready to get started on whatever project is freshest in her mind.  She is a quilter, so she’ll go the store with one fabric in mind for said fresh project, but of course will also buy four new fabrics that just call to her… and put them in a pile or stuff them in her closet.

So of course, piles have piled up and closets have become stuffed, and after looking in the craft closet yesterday, I picked up a bag of paperwork from 2008 and said “So, what do you want to do with this?”  And then we gutted the closet.

And of course, unlike all good bloggers, I forgot to take a before picture because I was swept up in the heat of the moment.  I found a picture of a cluttered craft closet online – please see below annotations for how bad her closet was:

That's pretty accurate

So she’s been hanging out on Pinterest and in Real Simple magazine (which, as my sister aptly said, is never really that simple), and she found this:

MUCH BETTER, but not really simple

So I spent all day yesterday helping her sort through all the clutter, deciding what goes, what she might actually use (keyword, “might”.  Babysteps), and how the heck any of that got into her craft closet to begin with.  I mean, a flatbed scanner from the early 2000′s? I took an entire carload of not-trash to my sister-in-law today for her church yard sale.  Not like, a trunk-load.  A whole car.

Then I pulled out my demolition expert hat and tore out the FOREST GREEN carpet, the padding, and the tack strip.  I took off the folding reddish colored oak doors, ripped out the middle shelf and supports, and had my much-stronger husband take out the large, warped center shelf that had like 80 finishing nails and caulking holding it to the support bracket.

And I painted over the ever-so-slightly sulfurized hard-boiled-egg-yolk green paint on the ceiling and side walls.  There are plans in motion for curtain colors and floor colors and back wall colors… but they are still in motion.

Do you have a good before image in your head now? Forest green carpet, egg-yolk green paint on the walls, red oak folding doors, and floor-to-ceiling folded and stacked fabrics and boxes?  Delicious.