Helping a Brother Out

My husband Joe has a lot of clothes. Way more than I do. And although he is the hardest working person I know, the poor guy comes home to share the smallest bedroom in the house and no closet (the one in our room houses our washer and dryer). As my grandma would say, that's a fine how do you do! Joe's clothes are therefore in several places around the house: in his dresser, on the shelf in our closet/laundry room, in my daughter's closet upstairs, and in the hallway closet I use for my hanging clothes. Until Cleaning Club this week there was no real rhyme or reason to what went where.

To top it off, Joe and my two kids were in a car accident on the Friday before Cleaning Club that totaled his car. They are all fine, but the residual emotional stress and the work necessary to deal with the aftermath were taxing on all of us this weekend and I didn't really know what we were going to do when Cleaning Club arrived Monday morning. And although nothing physically happened to me, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and really looking forward to having Shannon and Jennifer here with me, regardless of what we accomplished.

Once they were here I was able to think through what I wanted to do (which started with emptying my dishwasher and reloading it, as doing anything else here while the dishes sat there seemed silly): something to help organize Joe's clothes world better.

We emptied out the shelf in the laundry closet which was loaded down with sweaters and sweatshirts that neither of us really ever wear.


We sorted through them and loaded up a couple big bags of donations (which Jennifer quietly loaded off to take to Goodwill for me, a huge help). We were left with a tiny stack of my sweaters that went back on the shelf.


We decided to divide Joe's clothes into dress clothes and casual clothes. Dress clothes would go upstairs in his half of my daughter's closet, and casual would stay downstairs in his dresser. We went through his dresser drawers and refolded and reorganized them. We moved anything dressy up to the upstairs closet and did some rearranging and cleaning out while we were there.



We put all his ties on a hanger and all his underwear and socks in these hanging baskets. Look, Joe's underwear! This blog is no longer PG.


Joe was so thankful when he saw what we'd done. Not only did his clothes make sense now, but the sweaters above the dryer had worried him (apparently a fire hazard). I think it made him feel loved to have our little team working on something just for him.

A funny side story: A couple days after CC, Jennifer's daughter spent the night with my daughter. The two girls apparently got the Cleaning Club bug and spent hours cleaning my house! They dusted and washed windows and organized and scrubbed and decorated in almost every room in the house. It was amazing!


Beware: Cleaning Club is catching!

A note on photos: Jennifer didn't bring her camera this week, so we used our point and shoot. And we forgot to get any of Michael, who was of course in the middle of it all barking orders.