We have very exciting news today -- we're guest blogging over at Brooklyn Limestone as part of Mrs. Limestone's "Conquered Clutter" series! We're excited for our very first guest post, so much so that we're going to be talking about the behind the scenes of our adventure over here.

In honor of our first ever guest post (that we hope looked effortless and wonderful), we want to fill you in on a little secret. We busted our butts to get the project done and had no idea that we were going to do this project when we agreed to do the post. Shhh, don't tell Mrs. Limestone.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when Wendy openly and unapologetically called me out in front of the whole Internet about my messy wood shop/basement. You remember the post, right? So unfair ;-).

Well, that same day Wendy saw a post on Brooklyn Limestone seeking a few guest bloggers that were interesting in tackling closet organization as part of a 2012 clutter reduction commitment. We had just made this same commitment to ourselves, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Wendy sent an email over letting Mrs. Limestone know we were interested in participating, and after a few emails back and forth, Mrs. Limestone accepted our offer to guest blog and asked us to have something back to her the following Saturday.

Now mind you, Saturday was only about five days away and we had no clue what we were going to write about for our post. We started wracking our brains for an idea we could make a little bit interesting and there was no time to lose to find it.

One idea we had was to talk about our linen closet organization. Wendy had just completely cleaned out and organized our main linen closet upstairs (the only original closet in the house). The closet was lean, clean, and mean, complete with labels on shelves to define the responsibility of each individual area, and small storage containers for the little stuff and craft supplies.

Sure the closet was ultra organized (I mean, Wendy did do it, so it had to be), but the problem was that we had no before photos, no creative solutions for organization, and let's face it, it was not an "inspiring" clean-up beyond the neat folding job. We scratched that idea and kept noodling through our other options.

If you're a regular reader in these parts, you know we have no shortage of very active and long running ongoing projects, so it would have been great to write about something we'd already completed, but apparently that's not how we roll. Rather than try to reuse or reinvigorate a past project we said, "You know, our basement stairwell is a disaster, we're going to have to clean it as part of the basement cleanup, why don't we just do a quick clean up, organize the area, call it a day, and guest post about that?"

Hah! "Quick clean up and call it a day?" Yeah, not here at Old Town Home. Besides, look at how bad it was! Due to our lack of a single closet on our first floor, our basement stairwell has to double as not only the sole access point to the basement, but also as our coat closet and storage area.

We launched into the project with two very divergent ideas. I wanted a couple of simple shelves, Wendy wanted hanging metal baskets going down the left hand wall. While we both had practical reasons for the different approaches, we both agreed that it needed coat hooks galore, and that we mutually hated the current state of the cluttered stairs.

Just look at how much crap we fit into that "closet space." It was ridiculous.