Day: February 24, 2010

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Moving Stuff Around

It’s funny how one organizing solution can snowball into a massive reorganization project.

No, I’m not talking about the new dresser. I’m talking about the pocket organizer!

As I suspected, I have way more pockets than I have stuff to put into the pockets. So, I decided to move the cleaning supplies from under the sink to the pocket organizer to make the laundry supplies more accessible by putting them under the sink. They were previously in the cabinet under the wardrobe. This frees up the cabinet under the wardrobe for shoes, which are currently piled on my lounge floor, after being pulled out of their very unuseful spot in a basement storage bin.

(Are you yet as exhausted as I am?! 😀 )

While I’m moving all this stuff around, I’m also gathering clothes from the far reaches of the rig and either putting it into the new drawers, in a pile for laundry, or in a pile for donation. Ms. Tabitha felt a need to help, of course:

I’m at one of those points where I’m trying to decide who I am now. For all but, oh, two or three years, of my life I didn’t really care about clothes or how I looked. Then, I started to get disposable income and that all changed. The house I rented before moving into Miranda was huge, I had money to spend, I had girlfriends to go shopping with, and my favourite store was on the ground floor of my office building. I had a whole closet devoted to skirts, one to tops, two coat closets, a shoe closet, and several dressers for accessories. And, yes, I wore everything! It was so easy to see what I had and when I started to run out of room, I’d donate the least favourite pieces.

Now, I have a wardrobe that’s half the size of the smallest closet I had in that house, plus the cloth dresser, the drawer under the wardrobe, and the cupboard under the drawer. I started RVing by rotating my clothing seasonally, but that just didn’t work out. I’d find myself in places where the weather turned rapidly and without easy access to the right clothes.

I decided that the only stuff that was going under the rig was the truly cold weather exterior gear and everything else had to fit inside. The wardrobe at present is divided into thirds and I’m using every trick I can to maximize space, like putting more than one thing on a hanger.

So, who am I now? The slob who doesn’t care what she looks like or the clotheshorse? I’m, unfortunately, a clotheshorse who cares what she looks like who is dressed like slob. It’s just so much easier to pull out a pair of sneakers, jeans, and top than it is to find tights and nice shoes. I’m therefore working very hard at getting as much of the ‘slob’ clothes and footwear out of here and making the ‘nice’ stuff more accessible.  It’s still hard to distill my wardrobe down to just a few outfits because of the variety of things that I do. If I ever manage to work 100% for myself, then it will be much easier to really reduce how many clothes I need.

Well, back to work!

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Dressing Room Resolution

While I pondered the bucket chair problem, I decided to make a run into Courtney, a decent-sized community size between Campbell River and Nanaimo. Courtney has something that I miss a lot when I don’t have access to it: Walmart. For someone who used to be 100% anti-Walmart, I am now incredibly reliant on them. Where else can you go for a good quality selection of household goods at such fair prices? Canadian Tire and Sears, and sometimes Zellers, have the same stuff, but for about 30% more. There’s no date yet for the opening of the Campbell River Super Walmart and I got sick of waiting since I found on the walmart.ca website the solution to my dressing room problem.

I have mentioned that I wanted to put a lingerie chest next to the shower but was having a problem finding one the right size. As I searched, I tried to figure out how the heck I was going to secure something that massive and heavy. I thought of just sticking with my super ugly plastic tower, but that’s not securable, either, and it always crashes down at some point during my travels.

The solution isn’t as nice as a wooden dresser, but it looks a heck of a lot better than does plastic. It’s lightweight, durable, and flexible, and I have at least five ideas of how I can secure it for travel:

I bought two of these ‘ClosetMax 3 drawer storage units‘ and stacked them one on top of the other (so, no casters). The frame is metal and the drawers glide much better than I would have expected. They fit perfectly width and depthwise into the corner by the shower and there’s a couple of feet between the top of the second one and the ceiling.

Now comes the best part; getting my wardrobe organized once and for all. I’ve said that a few times, but I think that this might finally be the big IT. Except for my wardrobe needing new doors… There are not enough hours in a day. 😀

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Bucket Chair Dilemma

I put an ad out on Craigslist offering my bucket chairs free and, to my surprise, I got a few responses, with one being serious. Okay, now I need to get the bucket chairs out of the lounge, and fast!

I thought the chair nearest to the cab would be easy to pull out since I was pretty sure the bolts were accessible from the battery compartment. Ha ha ha ha ha.

As you can see in this picture, two of the bolts are hidden behind the compartment wall. I pulled as much of the wall as I could and was able to remove the nut on the bolt closest to the door. The fourth though, is a nightmare. I’m not a small gal and I simply cannot get both arms in there, one to hold the wall down and one to loosen the nut.

And let’s not get into the other chair. The bolts are hidden behind the fresh water tank.

Croft’s suggestion was to remove the bolts from above by grinding them. Nice in theory, but I tried that today and am certain that it will result in my burning my house down. I really don’t know if I should be doing anything that shoots hot metal sparks in all directions in such a small space.

The only good that came of this part of today is that I discovered that the top portion of my narrow pass-through is practically empty. I have space to put patio furniture!