Remember when I showed you the inside of my disorganized linen closet? Well, before starting the One Room Challenge I buckled down and did a full DIY linen closet organization using things from around the house and a few new tools. While it’s nothing like what the geniuses at The Home Edit come up with, I figured it was worth sharing.
After giving our upstairs hall a quick and cheap refresh, I decided it was time to finally tackle the linen closet. Our built-in linen closet is wide and deep, which is great for storage but bad for messes. Things get lost in there way too easily and there was enough room that you could just toss a pile of clean towels in and shut the door.
What really drove this organization project home, however, was that I had nowhere to store my craft supplies. I had random paints, fabric, thread, knitting supplies, and more just scattered around the house, making it tough to keep track of everything. I decided to take on a DIY linen closet organization project to see if I could create enough room to include my craft supplies in the closet along with our sheets and towels.
The Purge
The first thing I did was pull everything out of the linen closet and assess it. There were some random things in there that we definitely didn’t need: throw pillows from an old bed in a bag set, the lace curtains that had been hanging in the bathroom when we moved in, a SpongeBob snuggie, etc. After sorting through what we were keeping and what we were donating or tossing, I sorted the keepers into categories.
With everything sorted I refolded everything. I rolled hand towels, washcloths, beach towels, and throw blankets. I folded and matched sheet sets. I stacked bath towels. Just refolding everything had a huge effect on the organization. But I decided that wasn’t enough.
The Organization
I took this project a step further by buying some bins to corral smaller items to keep things from getting too disorganized in the future. I just grabbed some plastic baskets from HomeGoods, but you can find similar ones here. In the baskets went extra pillows, beach towels and blankets, hand towels and washcloths, and sheets and pillowcases that aren’t part of sets.
Once I had bought the bins I was full tilt into making this closet as functional as it could be. I couldn’t find contact paper, but I stuck some butcher paper onto the shelves since these things have been around for 100 years and aren’t too easy to clean. Then I bought a cheap label maker and went to town.
Instead of sticking the labels directly onto the shelves, I tacked up some ribbon to attach them. This should make moving things around much easier in the future. From there it was sorting and labeling: the aforementioned baskets, full sheet sets, queen sheet sets, and bath towels.
The Crafts
With all of those things sorted and folded, I still had a full shelf left to fit in my crafting supplies! Using one of the matching plastic bins, I organized my fabric scraps and sewing supplies. Instead of getting bins for the smaller items, I was able to wrangle up a bunch of LIVELY boxes and use my label maker to label those. There was still a bunch of room left, so I moved my miscellaneous art prints and frames in there as well, using a letter sorter to keep things organized.
That’s it! By using things around my house I was able to keep this DIY linen closet organization project pretty cheap. I spent around $30 on baskets and about $10 on the label maker, which were my only expenses. It’s not the most beautiful thing in the world, but knowing that everything has a designated spot makes keeping it organized a lot easier. Like, I did this project over two months ago and this is what it looks like now:
Anyone else really into organizing things these days? Something about having a sorted, orderly linen closet just makes me so calm. Let me know what you’ve been organizing lately and how you did it!
