Closet space

Somehow, it feels more like home now.
It’s interesting how an item of furniture can change things. This particular one is an armoire about 6 feet wide, 18 inches deep, and more than six feet tall, with one mirrored door and three wood ones. Hangers on the left, shelves on the right. There are no doorknobs or handles yet because I haven’t been down to the flea market to pick up a couple of funky ones. It takes up the short wall of my 9x12 bedroom, facing the door to the hall. In it are most all my clothes.

So ordinary. A freestanding closet.
Just go live without closets and you’ll see what a joy it is to install one all of a sudden. It’s magic.

Used to be, I hung what things absolutely required hanging in the tiny coat closet in the living room, and kept all my off-season things in boxes or in the armoire in the guest room. (it’s complicated - the guestroom armoire is an over-large, six ton affaire that took four people 40 minutes to wrestle through the window. It does not fit through the doors of the house. And while I could just move myself into the other bedroom I prefer the one with the eastern view of the garden and less road-noise.) So to dress I had to make the rounds of the house, which I usually didn’t and ended up wearing the same few things over and over.

Now... guess what?!

All of my wearables are in my room.
(Okay, except for miscellaneous coats and scarves.)

Like dominos falling over, the coat closet is a coat closet and if I have too many people over and some have to sleep on the couch, I don’t have to come through in my jammies to get a dress.
And the guest room, relieved of my clothes in the armoire, suddenly has storage space. Those random boxes and items that were taking up half the room are gone. One domino’s worth is in the armoire; another domino’s worth went for recycling, a third for regifting and another straight to the trash. The meer fact of dealing with the junk, the leftovers of moving in that I had no immediate use for, items you don’t need underfoot every day like the vacuum and the toolbox; just getting it straightened up made the room into a real room. It’s not an overflow room any more, but a place where it’s nice to lounge on the daybed and read a book.
Because of this transformation of a whole room, not even the room where the fabulous piece of furniture is installed, it feels like I have fully moved in.

The unpacking is at last complete.