One of the things I love most about Modern Family is that I am pretty sure I’m Claire Dunphy. She’s over-the-top Type A, always holding a glass of wine, married to a funny guy, and is a lady boss. I like to think I’m all of these things (wink), but to make it even better, she’s CEO of a closet company! I love closets. I can’t get enough of spaces that have doors to put all of our stuff in. You can dress them up, make them practical, and store so much. The key is creativity.
I recently redid our bathroom and the kids’ bathroom linen closets. There really wasn’t a purpose to the spaces, and we had stuff in both closets that would’ve made more sense moving them from one closet to another. They also needed a good purge. Anyone else collect perfumes, lotions, and candles to only store them in the never-to-be-found-again black hole in the back of the closet? No worries, these simple steps will get all of the mess cleared up so you can enjoy your clutter-free space and find everything you need when you need it!
(Note: I am not affiliated with any of the companies or products I share. Just passing along some things I love.)
1.Empty Out the Space
First order of business: Empty out EVERYTHING. You will never know what is in there until you face the music and bring it alllll out. But you can’t just throw everything on the ground without a plan. You need to create categories for the space you’re organizing. For instance, when I did the bathroom, I had towels, toiletries, sheets, medicines, hair products, and backstock. If an item doesn’t fit in a category, it doesn’t get to stand alone. You will have to create a new category, and if you can’t come up with a sensible one, it means that item doesn’t belong and either needs to be thrown out or moved to the appropriate location.
While removing everything from your closet, THROW AWAY OLD STUFF. If you haven’t used it within the past year or it’s expired, it needs to go. Listen, I have a tendency to hold on to stuff like anyone else, but after I toss it, I can’t tell you what I threw away a month later because I never really knew I had it. If you subscribe to Marie Kondo, she asks if it brings you joy. If you don’t use it, it can’t bring that much joy! Trust me. You might feel a few seconds of sadness once you pitch it, but you won’t even remember it later that night because you’ll be admiring your new and improved closet space!
2. Make Any Repairs or Modifications As Needed
If you have adjustable shelves, do not be afraid of changing height in order to fit certain baskets or items. This is one of the easiest changes you can make if you have the ability. If you can’t easily adjust the shelving, when you move on to Step 3, you may really want to consider drawers. Read on to hear about it…
Closets can be tough because a lot of closet systems have wires. WHYYYY?? Obviously Claire didn’t design our closets in our bathroom because the wire shelving is so impractical. No woman would have ever created that system. A simple fix for these wires is to cut an inexpensive MDF board to the correct width of the shelf and slide it on top of the wiring. This creates a solid space to slide containers on and off of the shelf. It also prevents anything from falling through the wiring. We didn’t need to do this in our bathrooms, but we did this in my daughter’s closet for a bookshelf. You can paint the boards or cover them with contact paper, too.
Another issue I have with wire shelves is they break at the ends. I’m super fortunate to be married to a handyman who can fix all of that for me. If you don’t have this luxury, YouTube is the place to go. You can learn how to solve any problem there!
3. Choose Your Containers
Once all of the things are fixed and adjusted as needed, look at all of your categories you organized. It’s time to decide how you’ll store everything. I love baskets of all kinds. Rubbermaid, wicker, cloth, woven. You name it, I can find a use for it. There are baskets of any shape and size available from your local stores to Amazon, so you should be able to find one to fit any space. They don’t all have to match either. You have a door on the closet for a reason. Of all of the rooms in your house, function needs to trump fashion here. With that being said, you can get ones that go together nicely so it doesn’t look like a total hodge podge.
There are so many types of labels available these days that you can add to containers that aren’t see through. In our household, we’ve got some asthma issues, so I decided to organize our medicines by “respiratory,” “cough and cold,” and “pain reliever.” All of our inhalers, breathing treatments, vicks, allergy meds, and nose sprays are in “respiratory.” Everything else like tylenol, band-aids, calamine lotions, and gauze are in “pain reliever.” I put these two categories in a rubbermaid bin because I could label them with a dry erase marker. These labels here can simply be attached to baskets, and you can change out the label with a dry erase marker anytime you need to. I put the baskets on the shelf high enough out of the way for kids, but low enough because we utilize these on a daily basis. (My kids are old enough to have access to medicine, so use discretion when storing potentially dangerous items in your own home.)
I then took a bigger basket (which was a gift I was given when I was pregnant with my daughter) for all of our cough, decongestant/cold medicines, and cough drops. This basket used to hold books, then it graduated to stuffed animals and blankets. It’s now the perfect container for the cold meds! Don’t be afraid to reuse great products as needed. This basket went on the top shelf because it holds the meds that we utilize the least of all of the other medicines. You can now find wicker baskets of all different shapes, sizes, and colors on Amazon. I love these. Don’t be afraid to play with shapes, too. Circle baskets are a great solution to fill spots where a square or rectangular container just won’t fit.
I am a huge fan of little pouches to store smaller things in larger bins. I have all of the medicine cups and syringes in a Thirty-One zipper pouch. I can quickly grab what I need when the kids need their liquid medicine, and I don’t have to rummage through a box looking for the appropriate cup. I also use a pouch like this for all of our essential oils. This pouch is in our bathroom because I am the one who applies it or puts them in our diffuser. Little pouches like this make the perfect home for tiny items that you need to be able to access easily. You can choose patterns and sizes at Thirty-One and add personalized labels with their embroidery option. I use HTV to personalize my items, so you can always do that instead.
I mentioned previously that if you can’t change the shelving, don’t be afraid to try drawers. I actually have two drawers under my sink in my bathroom that slide out my “must have” hair products and my other hair products I don’t use every day. You can choose from many colors if you don’t want plain.
I’ve also used rubbermaid drawers inside closets for toy organization. These drawers are stackable, so you can add as many as you have room for. If you don’t love the clear front, you can always pick a cute patterned paper, cut it to the size of the drawer front, and attach it to the drawer inside with double-sided tape. This trick is also a great way to tie in your colors and patterns even when you have different types of containers. I’ll do a whole separate blog on toy storage, but we use a ton of drawers for the kids. Let’s face it, they’re going to throw it all in a bin unorganized anyway, so I quickly learned that giving them the space to do that with a little bit of a method has helped a ton! In their bathroom, the kids’ bath toys are in a basket with holes so they can drain any excess water. I’m so sad that our days of bath toys are coming to an end, but I’m clinging tightly to this basket until they rip it from my clenched hands (sniff, sniff). You can find these baskets in a ton of different colors at Target and Walmart when you’re back to school shopping. They’re very popular for dorm rooms.
Finally, I keep the boxes that things come in if they’re good boxes. We buy wipes at Sam’s Club because once I had kids, I realized how amazing it is to always have wipes around! If you don’t have kids, take it from me and start buying wipes. Put them in your car, your purse, your bathroom. You’ll thank me later! There’s no sense in taking all of the wipes that perfectly fit in the already provided box only to put them in a different box that won’t fit them perfectly. This is where I say function over fashion. It’s not the prettiest box, but it does exactly what I need it to do.
4. Decide What to Do With the Other Items That Don’t Need a Container
Not everything in a closet needs to have a container. Towels are items that are used regularly, so putting them in a bin actually makes them harder to access, which causes frustration, which means your system doesn’t work and will eventually fail.
I just leave our towels and washcloths folded on the shelves. The kids can grab theirs whenever they need a clean towel, but it also helps me take inventory of when I need to do the laundry. Also, if you have guests, they will be able to grab a towel without hunting it down (or you can put them out for them if you’re a 5-star hostess!). My rule of thumb for towel sets is to always fold the body towels for the bottom, hand towels on top of those, and washcloths on top of the whole pile. We use Norwex, so the kids’ washcloths don’t match their towels. In this case, we just fold them in a pile for their use as needed.
I also leave out sheets, but I have finally found a method of storing the sheets to prevent them from getting messed up everytime you pull one set out of the closet. I can never fold that stinking fitted sheet neatly. I’ve watched videos, had a friend try to show me, and looked at step-by-step diagrams. They’re the devil’s work and do not ever fold correctly. So I decided to fold it as best as I possibly can, put the regular sheet on top of it, and slide the semi-neatly folded sheets into the pillow case. They stack so nicely, look so much better, and keep the set organized.
As I mentioned before, we shop at Sam’s Club. With that being said, we get a lot of toilet paper. I’m putting the disclaimer out there that I did not contribute to the TP shortage of 2020. I, too, struggled to find that stuff! Now that we can purchase it in bulk again, we stack it at the bottom of the closet in order to have it easily accessible when needed. In our powder room, however, we do have it on the bottom tier of a decorative shelf. Our guests use that bathroom, and there are few things worse than being in a foreign place needing to replace the TP roll but can’t find any!
Our backstock items also do not have a basket. The reason I don’t use a basket for these is because I can visually see what we need to buy. Remember that black hole in the back of the closet I mentioned before? When I was cleaning out our closet, I had six – six! – mascaras. This is what happens when you subscribe on Amazon and can’t see the products you have because they’re in a basket. Remember that your system has to be functional or it won’t be successful.
5. Place the Rest of Your Items in an Appropriate Place
The final step to putting everything away is to make sure the home you choose for the item makes sense. In our closet, I put our travel bags on the top shelf. We don’t travel a ton, but when we do quick trips, our toiletry bags are in the bathroom, which makes sense; they’re out of the way for the times we don’t need them; and we put them away easily when we get home. If we put them in the storage closet with our big suitcases we use once a year for our beach trip, we’d never utilize them, or they’d never get put away. Functional is the keyword here.
If every time you open your linen closets and cringe, try these 5 simple steps and channel your inner CEO of closets and be a Claire. Be confident with your container choices; be bold in mixing patterns, styles, and designs; and be brave purging the items you don’t need. A glass of Chardonnay is also welcome! 😉
