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Linen Closet

[from marthastewart.com]
I saw this organizing idea from Martha Stewart many years ago. Our small linen closet in the upstairs hallway finally got to me and I decided to plunge into this little project to add shelf dividers. Now, if you're a neat person, you don't really need to have these. If you have people in your family that still don't know where their shoes, underwear, and toys belong then this might help.

Unfortunately, I don't have a before picture showing the closet vomiting out all it's contents because, like most projects now a days, I start them with absolutely no planning and out of pure desperation and necessity. I was having a little nervous breakdown while trying to put stuff back in there that simply wasn't going to fit, and also over the prospect of having to pull out all of the sheets and figure out what size they were because someone in my family, that is not very short, decided to jumble them all up! I explained the system to this person, but unsupervised, they just put stuff where ever they can stuff it.

So.

I took some measurements of the depth and height of the shelves. I scoured the Martha Stewart website for a template.  Of course, it did not work for the dimensions in my closet.  I drew a template, then another, then another, and then finally got one that looked like it would work.  Then, I set the person responsible for messing up my closet organization system to work, cutting the brackets out of MDF.  Then, I tested his patience a little by suggesting that we might as well go ahead and paint the closet since I had already emptied it anyway.  We used some paint already on hand left over from the ceiling in the study.  Of course, there wasn't enough so we had to get more. 

I was quite happy with the result.  I spaced the dividers to fit sheets on the top shelf, towels and little towels on the second and bed covers on the bottom one.  I would have taken a picture of all my neatly folded stuff back in the closet but my mis-matched towels and linens kind of took my excitement down a notch.  Then I felt like I needed to get rid of everything and buy monochrome colored towels and sheets simply so they would look fabulous in the closet like they do in magazines and organization blogs where there are only five things in the closet. 

That didn't happen.


Before

After
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Comments

  1. TeresaMay 28, 2012 at 4:26 AM

    Brilliant! I have the exact same problem with the same member of my family when it comes to sheets, towels, basically anything that's in our linen closet! I had a wonderful system, but it would only work when I put everything away.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ClaudiaJune 13, 2012 at 8:30 PM

    Love the organization. Great design on the dividers.

    ReplyDelete

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