Happy Saturday! It’s a fun filled weekend over her as we celebrate Greg’s birthday- hence keeping it nice and short for you today! I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about these January ‘organized living’ posts, and I LOVE that it’s inspiring, has you thinking, and desiring to make small changes in your own home. That’s my goal!

This is technically the last Saturday in January (how can that be?!) but I plan on sharing two more posts with you after this one: our laundry room and organization tips around the house (a mishmash of things that don’t need an entire post on their own). Then I’ll resume sharing a variety of topics while STILL throwing in organized living tips throughout- they won’t be gone forever!

So today: our cleaning closet. I’ve alluded to it before, but this is THE only closet on our main floor (besides bedroom closets). AND it’s ‘cut in half’ because of the stairwell to the basement. It also is the only entrance to our attic (we haven’t been up there yet) so we had to keep that opening somewhat accessible.

We do have two bedrooms on the main floor with closets. BUT, as I live by the words I preach, you don’t have to fill up every single space. One of our bedrooms, plus it’s closet, is completely empty. Some would argue that we are wasting perfectly good space and should use it for storage or cleaning supplies/linens. Our mindset however, is that these bedrooms are hopefully future kids rooms. When we (Lord willing) have kids, we don’t want to have to find new homes for things and stress about losing closet space/storage. So it stays empty. The other bedroom is our ‘office’ – the closet in there is lightly filled with decor and we have a desk and printer. If we need this room in the future for a child’s room- we can easily move the ‘office’ and decor to the basement or get rid of the desk all together. We purposely leave the ‘office’ quite empty too.

So what were we to do with our cleaning supplies and linens? Two things that normally go in ‘closets’? I decided I wanted to keep cleaning supplies on the main level because, well, I clean the main level most often and wanted them easily accessible. Linens I didn’t care as much about- you’ll see next week that we chose to keep the linens in the laundry room instead.

We also had to have a little bit of space in this closet to devote to coats. Remember the lack of storage in our entryway? We combated that with plenty of hooks. However, Greg and I both have heavier winter coats that we don’t wear day-to-day. We wanted these somewhat accessible too during the winter months. (When winter is over, we plan to move the coats on our entryway hooks downstairs for the Spring/Summer to ‘lighten’ up the space.)

So, we have a tiny closet that needed to hold both our cleaning supplies and extra coats. I had no idea how I was going to make it work. After studying the space a bit and perusing the ‘organization’ aisles at stores, I decided that this narrow 2 shelf storage system would work beautifully. It would take up about half the closet (leaving the other half for coats) and it would allow for vertical storage.

I also had this random shelf thing (I believe my dad made it WAY back in the day to put our printer on, I then used it at the condo to set my TV on in the bedroom, and didn’t know if I’d find a use for it at the new house- but I did!) and setting the shelving unit on top if it gave us now 3 shelves with storage above and below. So my little 2 shelf unit now holds 5 shelves worth of stuff! Always, always, always be thinking about how you can maximize your space. Here I had to work upwards.

I also used tons of…..BASKETS. (Seriously, your best friend for organization.) I also went through my cleaning supplies and got rid of anything I hadn’t used in 6+ months. As you’ll see, NO I’m not an organic-clean-all natural-cleaning type person. KILL THE GERMS. USE THE CHEMICALS. We’ll all die eventually…I doubt it’ll be from the chemicals in my cleaning supplies. Just sayin’.

Here is what our closet looks like with all those shelves/baskets/coats in place. PERFECTION! Everything has a home, AND everything fit WITH room to spare/keeping easy access to the attic if needed.

I also found these hook things on amazon- because where was my microfiber mop and long duster going to fit!? Put these on the walls- voila! You can find them (here).

And there you have it. Best part of it all- we’re halfway through winter and haven’t touched those coats yet. If they’re still there come Spring, you better believe they’ll be donated! Can you imagine how much better the closet would look with some free space!? (Heart eyes… I could even add another shelving unit for spare towels….now I have myself rethinking how important these coats are…maybe I won’t wait until Spring!)

Do you have a closet that could use some revamping? Do you push the door shut and hope for the best? Think about how you could add in some easy fixes like a $15 shelf or some baskets. Make the most of your space!