Organized Linen Closet
The following is a guest post from regular contributor, Sharon at Mom of 6. Sharon is going to knock your socks off with her purging powers. Wowzers!!
Over the past year I have invested a fair amount of time on decluttering my home, paring down on things we don’t use or need, and organizing spaces that were desperately in need of some structure. But there are still some areas that I’ve yet to conquer- one of them being our hallway linen closet.
Now it’s a nice sized closet- but when you consider the fact that I have 8 beds in our house, we need this amount of space! But when it is this over-stuffed- and you can’t find anything that you are looking for, and you pull out a set of sheets and have to spend time unfolding them to check the size tag and then re-folding them when they aren’t the ones you need- well- it’s time to do something about it!
And lest you think this is my only “closet of shame”, you need to look no further than down the hall to this small “cleaning closet” to find another problem area. We mainly use this closet to store large fuzzy blankets that my kids like to cuddle up with when they watch TV, or build forts with- and when they are done, they just toss them all inside in a huge pile, and then push with all of their might to force the door to close. And what you are left with- is blanket fringe sticking out from under the door. And for some reason- this makes me nutty!
Fortunately, Laura has inspired me with her 31 Days to Organized Closets! The first step is removing all of the items from each shelf- and to make some decisions about what should stay (because we love it, use it, need it, or want it AND have room to store it), and what should go.
And just to give you a good giggle (at my expense), here are some items that were removed from this linen closet and were immediately bagged up for donation:
- 5 sets of king-sized sheets (apparently I have saved every set of sheets that I have EVER purchased for my bed. In spite of the fact that they were old and tired looking and that’s why I replaced them!)
- 2 toddler comforter covers (my kids have been out of the toddler stage for 4 years now)
- at least 3 sets of towels per family member (because again- when I replace things I have a habit of keeping the old ones around “just in case”!)
- 3 sleeping pads for camping (even though we purchased air mattresses 3 years ago)
- assorted other mish-mash that I forgot we even owned.
12 bags of linens are now awaiting pick up by the nice folks at gooddonor.org!
Everything is organized- and even LABELED! No more unfolding sheets to find the size! (I made the labels using PicMonkey, printed them on my home printer, and laminated them).
Thanks for the inspiration Laura!
So what closet are you going to tackle first? Please leave a comment and share!
