Everything In Its Place

In an effort to continue organizing every area of my life, this is by far the one area that I have been dreading.  The before of this project is absolutely embarrassing.  There was seriously no where to walk in this closet, things were crammed in everywhere, things that do not belong in a closet and an excess of all things that do belong in there.  This room has been a terrible place to begin and end my day.

One of the major issues of this house of ours for me is that we have no actual basement, because it is a split level and there is very little storage anywhere.  The largest storage area we have is the attic and it gets too hot and too cold to store many things, I lost a snow globe stored in a box of Christmas and learned the hard way about that.  So I have learned to become very creative.

Because we have four bedrooms, two of which are large and two that are on the smallish side, we opted to put the girls in one room and separate the boys, leaving the master suite for Rob and I (obviously).  In our recent remodel we opened up our main floor eliminating my space for crafting.  I didn't realize how much I'd miss it, I thought I would craft on the kitchen table, but I don't like not being able leave it and come back without having to clean up every time.  So in the midst of my closet makeover I carved out a little space for crafting also.


I was very surprised to find how many of the file boxes I had on that top shelf full of, well, basically crap!  A couple of them were almost empty even.  I kept thinking, how did this get THIS BAD?  Obviously life is hectic and somethings can get pushed to the side, apparently all of those things got pushed into my closet.

So, here is the BEFORE...(CRINGE!)

AND, the AFTER...(Dramatic, isn't it?)

To achieve my dramatic results I actually filled more than 7 bags of items to take to charity and trash and spent about 18 hours over the course of 3 days.  I kicked the 2 file cabinets to the curb, they were sitting in there with basically nothing in them, just taking up space.  Also the paper sorter was tossed and I organized my papers in a smaller file box with it now sitting by the printer in my room (what a great idea, put it where you use it!).
Generally I like to plan out what I'm going to do when I start a project like this, in this case, I pretty much just dove in and let it evolve on its own.  I knew that I wanted a craft space, but I wasn't sure if I could squeeze it in.  I moved things around several times to get it just right.  I had the black desk sitting in the hallway because there was no room in the garage to store it (Rob's working on that space this week!).  We do not have dressers in our bedroom, to save space, so instead I use these Sterilite three drawer sets, they work great for crafts and clothes.

This is not a huge closet, but it is good sized at 6 foot wide and 12 foot long.  The gem in it is that it has a window!  You could only see glimmers of light through the hanging clothes before, so the desk just had to go in front of it.  To organize, I scrounged all over the house, garage, attic and other closets to find all the bins, baskets, and containers to put everything in.

The things I purchased were the self-adhesive plastic labels for totes and drawers.  I found them on eBay, they cost $1.99 for a package of 6.  I also purchased the 12x12 plastic container at Michael's, it was $19.99 with three hanging folders and I used the 40% off coupon for that.  The tags I laminated myself and the chalkboard labels I had from some previous projects, I bought them on eBay also.

I am fully aware that most people do not just collect the types of things you see in here, so I did go in search of some items that would work similarly and found several containers that you could use at the Dollar Store, Walmart and Target.  My favorite places for baskets are TJ Maxx and Gordmans. Several fabric baskets and boxes were on clearance at Lowe's also.

Tips for organizing your own closet or craft space

1. Decide how you will use the space
2. Only keep items in your space that you currently are using (only clothes that CURRENTLY FIT!) 
3. Have plenty of trash bags on hand
4. Make a give it away box, trash, and sell box and sort through EVERYTHING
5. Combine like items (maybe this is a "duh")
6. Label boxes and baskets to make items easy to find
7. Don't overfill boxes or drawers to allow for growth (this is especially important for crafting supplies)
8. Everything MUST have a place
9. Use all surfaces for storage including the door

Since my closet makeover this is now a place that I feel freedom of creativity with everything in reach, and it's a wonderful place to start the day and end it.  Now there is a place for everything and everything is in its place.