Project: Conquering the master bedroom

Before…

…and after!

The Client and I set up a quick video call to talk about the following:

• The project: large master bedroom, used by the client. 
• Flat’s location and accessibility: central London, 4th floor.
• Room’s furniture: 1 bed with storage, 3 large wardrobes, 1 chest of drawers, 1 desk, 1 soft storage unit.
• Goals and requirements: make getting dressed easier and reduce total belongings to what was needed/used.

We settled for 20 hours in-person work, which included one hour consultation and some ‘homework’ for the client (to stay within the hours).

Medium/large master bedroom, with double bed and various wardrobes and furniture.

We sat down and looked at priorities:

1. Furniture: some of it needed TLC
2. Content: each ‘wardrobe’ needed a purpose

1. Furniture:

• Large closet would be allocated to ‘work clothes’: in good condition, but needed to be re-organised
• Dark closet homed mostly ‘dress up clothes’: definitely overloaded, needed to shed some weight
• Smallest wardrobe for ‘everyday clothes’: I renamed it the The Leaning Tower of Clothes (as it fell sideways when opening), needed fixing
• Shoe rack behind the door: needed organising and fixing (some shelves collapsed)
• Chest of drawers: in good condition, but not used in the best way and impossible to find anything
• Desk in the corner and bedside table: drawers collapsed and needed fixing, content to be re-organised
• Under the bed storage: so much potential but not organised; we ordered some boxes from Amazon to improve space usage

2. Content:

• Work clothes: scattered around the room, needed to be brought together and made accessible/tidy.
• Going out clothes: to be stored in the dark closet in the corner, with some items to be resold.
• Everyday clothes: a lot were old or not the right size so we needed to filter through it for donations.
• Nightwear and fancy dress: most of it was going to stay, but needed to be brought together and split by season. 
• Accessories and shoes: some to be donated or recycled, the rest to be stored in the wardrobe or the shoe rack. 
• Self-care and medicines: to be organised in one place, by type and expiry date.
• Towels and bed linen: one box to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them (definitely going under the bed).

We started with The Leaning Tower of Clothes… erm, I mean the everyday clothes wardrobe. After getting the ok from the client, I did some DIY and fixed it using what we already had (I can be pretty handy with a hammer and a screwdriver). It was much more stable now – Yay!

Next, we did a ‘take out everything and only put back what you need’ and went through the clothes in the wardrobe. We decided what to keep, donate, and recycle and only put back what needed to stay, nothing else.

The chest of drawers was next: we moved all self-care and pharmacy products in there, for easier access. 

We followed the same process – ‘take out everything and only put back what you need’ – for the second wardrobe and work clothes! We also arranged all the pyjamas in boxes by season.

When we sorted through the soft furniture (the black one with the three large drawers), we decided to allocate that to underwear. We gathered all the bras and panties we could find, and sorted though it, before storing neatly in there.

With just eight hours left on our plan, the client’s homework kicked in. Using the same methods as before, they did the last wardrobe themselves, and emptied the under the bed storage.

This way, our last day was spent organising everything else and creating a sustainable system moving forward. 

We finished all remaining corners of the room. The shoes rack needed TLC and, with the help of some electrical tape, I quickly fixed the falling shelves. We then re-arranged the shoes as not to overload it again. We cleaned the top of the wardrobes and used the space to home a couple of long term storage items.

Under the bed we neatly stored six brand new transparent plastic boxes, for less frequently used items.

Lastly, we decided to create an admin corner. Because we all have life admin.

Since the desk was going to be thrown out, I decided to fix it and gave it new life. Two out of three drawers collapsed and needed nailing into place, which I did, and then we used it to store all documents, books, gifts, and wrapping paper that was in various places in the room.

That’s it! All done 🙂

Check out how much more spacious it looks!

Large bags of donations for the local charity shop

Small bags of re-sellable items to be listed online

Medium bags of unused shoes to be donated.

Small bags of rubbish to be disposed of.

Large bags of plastic and cardboard to be recycled

Medium bag of expired medicines for the local pharmacy

Medium bag of clothes needing some stitching/fixing.