This is a re-post of a previous page as I am re-arranging my website. Thanks for your understanding!

In the spirit of transparency… I told you I would deal with the underbelly of life….cleaning closets! We have 6 closets in our house and I have cleaned out 5 of them. But the last one, our bedroom walk in closet… I just didn’t have the stamina to do alone. So, this past rainy Saturday my husband and I tackled the job. While we are not hoarders, we certainly have been “stashing stuff” for a number of years. To be fair, the closet hasn’t been cleaned in over 10 years and to be fair, we collect a lot of things, and to be fair, we are messy genealogists. It was a dirty job, but I don’t think I wanted Mike Rowe in my house, so we did it ourselves!

My recommendations for a job like this is to commit to starting and finishing on the same day. If you have the space, empty all of the contents into another space so that you really see what kind of “stuff” you are gathering. We grouped like things together then determined what we were keeping, what was garage sale or donation and what was TRASH!! Amazing what suddenly becomes trash when you need to figure out how to put all this stuff back in the closet! We already were using plastic containers, but some will need to be re-organized – but that is for another day.

During this process, we had the realization that we are empty nesters and gosh darn it, we can put stuff in other bedrooms should we want to!! Duh! So, we did move a shelf of books to another room as well as our out of season hanging clothes. That helped a lot! if you don’t have this option, you may need to think about re- organizing/re-purposing other areas in your house. Once we had it all sorted, trashed and combined we were ready to put things back in the closet!

In the process we found a couple of really great treasures  – I have shared them below! The first is  the hat that my mother wore at her wedding in 1947. This hat is 68 years old and in beautiful condition! You may have noticed the pink hat box in the closet…. the box is now empty and the had is on display in my living room.  The second is the actual Supplement to the Belfast Weekly Telegraph from March 31, 1894. This item is 121 years old. It is from the unveiling ceremony of the statue of Rev. Hugh Hanna, my great-great uncle. He was a Presbyterian minister in Belfast and was well known for his inflammatory street preaching against Catholicism. The IRA bombed the statue in 1970.