Closet Reveal

As many of you already know, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to organize.  I don't know where it comes from, and I definitely wouldn't consider myself to be type A, but I really do love to have a place for everything.   Many of the organizational systems that are currently in our house I learned about from reading books, blogs or watching youtube tutorials.   With that said, I would never call myself an organizer, I just have a desire to seek out functional systems and a knack for adopting those systems as my own. 

During my parents most recent visit in late October, we spent some time brainstorming ways to make our closets more functional.   We don't have a basement and we have very few closets in our house, but one of our closets in particular is deep.  Not deep in the sense that it could be a walk-in, but deep enough that we were able to maximize it's holding capacity by moving the hanging bar forward and putting some custom shelving behind.  This ended up being one of my favorite house projects thus far because I was able to fit almost two closets worth of stuff into our newly updated guest room closet.  We of course took the opportunity to go through our stuff and donate things we don't need or don't use, but having a place for things that we still care about but don't use very often is so nice. 

We started by piling everything onto our guest bed.  Things are always worse before they are better! 

Then Shawn got to work measuring, cutting and installing.  I don't have a "before" picture of what the closet looked like before he put those shelves in, but he custom build all of the white shelves in the back and moved the hanging bar forward.  I specifically wanted one side of the shelving to be open on the bottom so that we could still tuck things in there like our file boxes and other large items that are too big to fit on a shelf, which is what you are seeing on the left side.   

After Shawn was done building our closet, he tagged me in and we both spent Nicole's nap time sorting through our stuff and carefully putting away everything.  Once Nicole woke up she came in to check out what was going on and said, "wow, look at all that stuff!" 

As you can see, once we added things to our hanging bar, the majority of the shelving is hidden and a little bit harder to access.  While it's certainly not ideal to have to move things out of the way to get to other things, it's still a very functional storage closet and meets our primary goal of having almost all of our infrequently used stuff in one place.  

This closet was step one in getting our house ready for baby brother to arrive.  The reason we emptied our other guest room closet is because we are turning that room into Nicole's room and leaving the nursery as is.  Nicole doesn't know she's getting a new room yet, so don't tell her! We'll reveal her new room/closet once we spend some more time on it.  Right now it's mostly empty and waiting for a little time and attention, which we plan on giving it sometime in the next few weeks.  

What big projects are you hoping to tackle soon? 

Love, 

Erica