Skeleton in the Closet

For some time now I have been hunting for a tallboy to tuck into the corner of our bedroom, to take on some extra storage for bits and pieces, some overflow clothes storage (not mine, you understand!). We can fit everything in the cupboards we now have, but it is all a bit congested. So I have been trudging around shops (my absolute favourite and my best... not) with my measuring tape. I did find a simply darling antique cedar chest of drawers... but it was a little too long. The problem is, it is a very small corner we are trying to squeeze a largish piece of furniture into.. and I was very bored with shopping. I stood in our dressing room hoping for a solution.

Our dressing room used to be the walk in pantry, back in the day when our bedroom was the kitchen (a lot of our rooms have a history like that..). We have lined it with wardrobes, and the double wardrobe on this wall is our linen cupboard. I was staring at it vaguely, thinking about my mother's linen closet in the house I grew up in. Which was the size of a single wardrobe. Sure we have two more people in our family, but I don't store the towels in mine.. I decided to downsize the sheets.

Here is what I had to start with..

All the sheets, all the mess. The only reason there is a tiny gap on the right there is because I just recently passed on Posy's cot sheets. Yes, Posy who is eight. I can't believe I actually transferred them into the new linen closet last year..

Why is it so hard to get rid of sheets? I think I have manchester anxieties. I appear to have an excessive number of duvet covers, and slightly too many sheets. I took a deep breath and filled up a box for the Refugee Welcome Group.

I just kept going until what was left fit in the single cupboard.

Girls' sheets up the top. Everything in shades of blue and pink, so they can choose pink, or blue, or go mad with mix and match, and it all still looks OK for their control freak mother.

Master bed sheets. All white. So easy. The Boy has brown. And yes, he now only has one pair of sheets other than the one on his bed. In truth, that's all he has been using for a couple of years, because he didn't like the other two sets I had in the cupboard for him. So now they have gone to a better home.

And now The Man can arrange his clothes elegantly in the double wardrobe (as you can see, like me, he doesn't do colours!), and we don't need a chest of drawers in the bedroom any more. So I am thinking of one of those ducky little Edwardian glass-fronted book cases, the ones with the leadlight panes....

You see, there are so many benefits to decluttering, and not shopping!