If you had to choose between extra an storage or a laundry closet which would you choose? Me? I’d probably say BOTH! I look at laundry room makeovers such as DaNita’s on Delightlful Order and pin it with envy. My family lives in a 1950s home in central Oklahoma. You know what that means? Our laundry facilities are in the garage…no lovely laundry room cabinets or laundry room counter-tops. Basically, whether it be 15 degree weather or 115 degree weather I spend a lot of quality time staring at our cars each week.
Be that what it may, since our laundry facilities are in the garage, we have two hallway storage closets. The first hall closet I shared with you last month we turned into a bathroom/medicine cabinet closet. As promised in my cleaning supplies post last week, the second closet I am going to share with you today is a our cleaning supplies and miscellaneous storage closet.
I know…I know…I should have some before pics. Seriously though, let’s just say it was not pretty and leave it at that. There were cords stuffed here and there and cleaning supplies floating out my ears.
The closet is across the hall from the hallway bathroom and opens via a very narrow door. When it came to organizing this closet my biggest challenge turned out to be arranging the items in the closet such that you could get them out again without having to take everything else off the shelf in the process. While the closet is a good size because the door is so narrow I had trouble getting stuff in and out.
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| Two 3M hooks are added to the closet door to hold my shmop and broom. |
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| Our narrow closet with lots of storage. The handle you see is my steam mop. If you have laminate, tile, or laminate-wood flooring I highly recommend one. It’s green and works so much better than any other cleaner I can find to clean our laminate-wood floors. |
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| I use the two picnic baskets we received as wedding presents for paper good storage. |
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| Craft supplies, light bulbs, computer cords, audio cords, massage therapy items, and shoe polish all in their right boxes. |
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| My favorite part of the closet…neatly organized cleaning supplies all in a caddy that can easily be picked up to take anywhere. I also picked up two stacking bins in the Target dollar section for my microfiber clothes and old rags. |
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| The highlight of the closet–cute labels customized from Barbara Lee’s digiscrap designs. |
Now that my storage/cleaning closet is cleaner I have to say I almost want to clean everyday just so I can open the closet door and look at the clean closet again. Almost….
My takeaways from this project:
- Only keep those cleaning supplies you ACTUALLY USE. If you don’t use it give it to a friend or trash it. They are just taking up valuable space.
- Store like with like.
- Put your most used items on the shelf closest to your middle.
- Label…label…label.
- Make the labels you do create cute and you’re more likely to enjoy what you see. I just print mine off the computer and cover them with packing tape.
- Multi-purpose your containers. Do you have a picnic basket you never use for picnics? Use it for storage. What about that bucket you use to clean the windows once a year? Use it for your cleaning supplies and it becomes a useful item instead of just something else to store.
- Make sure when you put items on a shelf you can easily retrieve them without disturbing the other items on the shelf. Otherwise, you will probably get frustrated each time you try to access an item and chaos in the closet will soon follow.
