Home improvement projects can simmer for years on the back burner, but eventually they have a pesky way of bringing themselves to the fore and making you deal with them.
Take the recent closet avalanche before work one morning. An attempt to find a particular pair of running pants brought down the house of cards that was the storage system for my husband's workout clothes. It was the perfect storm of too much accumulated stuff and an inefficient storage setup we had tolerated since moving in. A sudden freefall of clothing yielded a certain amount of swearing on someone's part, an enormous mound of clothes heaped on the bed, but no sign of the elusive pants.
I seized the moment to suggest a swing by Ikea on the way home to check out more useful storage options. An hour of shopping, $63 and a certain amount of assembly that involved some satisfying whacking with a rubber mallet later and we had the bare bones of a workable closet system. Not the closet system of our dreams or the stuff of magazine spreads, mind you, but serviceable and a vast improvement.
While the new set of pull-out bins was more accommodating than the old shelving, we still couldn't put away quite all of the pile, but some much-needed purging of items not worn in years solved that problem. And then we were left to ask that age-old homeowner's lament: Why didn't we do this sooner?
How about you? What home improvement projects have made you wonder why you waited so long? And how have you tamed closet catastrophes?
Oh, and those elusive pants? They were eventually found in the laundry basket.
