Closet Organization Ideas

Date

Every January when my Christmas decorations come down, I look forward to a fresh start. Before I put back my every day decor, I wipe down baseboards, dust book shelves, and vacuum under the furniture. If helps me start the year off feeling fresh and energized! I also get the urge to organize and purge our cluttered spaces – i.e. our closets.

You don’t realize just how many closets you have until you commit to reorganizing them all in a 2 week time frame! Whew! But I can say, now that I’m done, it feels amazing to know everything has its place! Not only am I going to show you how I organized, but I’ll link everything I used at the bottom of the page so you can find it easily!

Master Bedroom

We are not fortunate enough to have a large walk in closet, so I had to carefully plan out how to maximize our space. Thankfully, we have 2 reach-in closets in the master. Mine is larger with bifold doors, and Tim’s is about half the size of mine. When we moved in, both closets only had one hanging bar. I found an inexpensive bar and shelving unit at Home Depot, which gave me much more room to hang my clothing and lots of shelves. We also took the doors off of my closet so that I could see more of my items and access things on the sides more easily.

I chose white woven baskets with leather details where I keep folded pajamas and active wear. Without closet doors, I wanted something not only functional but beautiful too.

My tall boots stand upright with boot shapers and the rest of my shoes are organized with holders that allow you to stack one shoe on top of the other. This doubled the amount of space for shoe storage! And if you know me and my shoe obsession, this was a major find!

For Tim’s closet, we added a shoe rack, some wire baskets, and a few open-front bins so he can easily access things like folded denim.

Bonus Tip – Matching hangers instantly elevate the look of your closets and make everything appear neatly organized.

Linen Closet

Our linen closet is located on the 2nd floor in the hallway. It is where we keep our extra bed linens and our clothes hampers. The challenge with this space is that the shelves are very deep, so I had to be mindful with how I arranged everything. I first measured my shelves to see what types of storage bins would fit best. I chose another white woven basket that I have used before in other spaces of my home. Plus, they’re very inexpensive!

With deep shelves, storing items in bins makes it much easier to keep everything organized when you need to reach something on the back of the shelf. So now, instead of stacking our folded sheets in piles with the risk of them falling over, everything is corralled into bins that can be easily removed to reach to the back of the shelf.

I used two large baskets to store the master bedroom duvet covers and my son’s XL twin blankets. On another shelf, I used medium sized baskets to organize our sheets by bed size. Choosing white baskets brightens up our dark closet and makes it feel fresh and clean! Just like with hangers, matching baskets automatically makes the space feel more organized!

We also keep extra blankets and special quilts in this closet that only get used on occasion. I wanted a storage solution that would keep them protected and would also fit on the very top shelf of the closet. I found an amazing zippered fabric bin option on Amazon and I am thrilled with them! I was able to fit 4 large blankets and quilts along with one standard bed pillow into one bin! Based on my experience with this brand, I will happily buy from them again!

We have the exact same issue with the guest bathroom closet – deep shelving. I organized this closet in the same way – everything stored in matching bins with the things we use less often being stored in the back. I also found these dry erase clip on tags to label everything. They can easily be removed and wiped clean to use somewhere else.

Bonus tip – Over the door shoe holders can be used for so much more than shoes! Here, I use one to hold all of our bathroom cleaning supplies.

“Mud Room”

We actually do not have a mudroom in our home, so I needed to find an alternate way to store our coats and accessories. While we do have a small entry way coat closet, we enter our home from the garage and would have to walk to the other side of the first floor to put away coats and shoes.

Using the Pax closet system from Ikea, we built a storage space in our garage where we can store all of the items we typically use when leaving the house. I love the Pax system because there are so many ways to customize your space. We hung one hanging bar for all of our coats and chose pull out shelves to store all of our rain and snow boots, along with shoes we wear to work outside.

Large mesh baskets pull out like drawers, so you can easily find and grab what you need. We installed enough baskets for each person in our family to have their own, including one for the pets plus a few extra. Here, we keep our hats, mittens, and scarves along with seasonal items such as sunscreen and raingear.

I hope you find some inspiration here in my world of organization! Do you have a closet or storage space that you just can’t quite figure out? Leave a comment or send me an email! therurallegend@gmail.com Maybe we can figure out the space together!

xoxo, L