Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Shoe Closet in Disguise

With the start of a new year comes the desire to do some winter organization in our home, kind of like spring cleaning, but focusing on sorting through belongings, giving unneeded items away, and organizing the remaining stuff.

 

My friend Stephanie loves our shoe closet idea.  We have a two-story home, with all bedrooms upstairs, so running upstairs to grab a pair of shoes with ten kids living in our home was a little bit of a challenge.

 

Hence, the shoe closet. 

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However, we didn’t have closet or storage space downstairs for all of our shoes.  So, we used an old armoire, a really big one, to house our shoes.  A shoe closet in disguise.  We have quick and easy access to our shoes, plus it looks nice and tidy when the doors are closed.

 

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However, over time, all of the shoes had gotten all mixed up and disorganized.  One member of our family continuously rearranges the shoes, mixing everyone’s up, so I decided to tackle reorganizing the shoe armoire.  I took the above photo after I’d already started reorganizing.

 

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First I made sure each shoe had a match.

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Because Selah has a shoe fetish, she LOVES to change her shoes every five minutes.  Because of her ACC (agenesis of the corpus callosum—the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres), Selah doesn’t really recognize the fact that she only has one shoe on much of the time (the brain isn’t sending a signal from one side to the other to communicate that the other foot needs a shoe).  In fact, most of the time, Selah just wants one shoe on.  Then she takes that one shoe off when she’s outside and replaces it with a different one.  We noticed she prefers to have a shoe on her right foot.  I cracked up when I found FIVE left shoes without a match.  She only had one right shoe without a match.  Too funny.

 

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I flipped the shelves upside down to form a lip on each shelf so the shoes wouldn’t fall out when we open the closet doors.  I gave each kid their own space within the shoe closet.

 

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I labeled each shelf clearly.

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Then organized each pair of shoes onto the shelves.  Ahhhhhhh, feels so good to have the shoe closet organized again.

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And then we close the doors and once again, no one knows what’s hiding inside that old armoire.

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