How I Organized My Guest Room Closet

A few months ago I shared my home organization projects for the year. I have to admit that even though I was diligent about scheduling two projects a month, I am very far behind. I keep thinking my daughter’s room will get done, but it just hasn’t happened. There is some disconnect with her that either she is tired of cleaning up and has shut down, or she really does not see the mess in front of her. Oh, well, we’ll trudge on and hopefully have it cleaned and organized soon.

One project I had scheduled to do in February was cleaning out and organizing my guest room closet. I finally got to tackle it this week. As I had thought, this was a very quick organization project. It took me less than 1½ hours to empty the closet then get everything put back in an organized fashion.

You can organize any extra closet you have in your home in a similar manner. By extra closet I mean any closet that is functioning for more than one purpose. This may be a hall closet, a coat closet, a utility closet, or even a closet in a bonus room or game room.

The guest room closet has become a catchall space. You know, the kind of space you fill up with things that don’t have another home or you don’t know where else to store.

My goal with this closet was to remove items that belonged somewhere else, discard items no longer needed or wanted, and organize my wrapping supplies.

Here is what the closet looked like before I organized it.

You can see that things are just piled in there and my wrapping supplies are out of control.

Here is what it looks like now.

 

I got my wrapping supplies organized and stored in this handy wrapping cart from Container Store.

 

I had a ton of leftover fabric from some home décor sewing projects. I stored all of it on the top shelf. I also stored study guides from Bible studies I’ve completed over the last several years. I did not have a great place to store them in my office. And the banners you see hanging were in our room when we went to Disney World for Christmas.

On the other side of the closet, I stored boxes from Precious Moments figurines in the brown basket on the top shelf. I folded extra blankets and put them at the bottom. You can’t see them very well, but I had some extra picture frames that I didn’t want to part with, so I leaned them against the wall in the corner.

I love how it turned out!

Maybe you have a catchall closet in your home you are not sure how to organize. Here are a couple of tips to get you started:

• Take everything out of the closet.
• Sort through everything by putting items in one of four piles: keep, put somewhere else, donate, trash.
• Wipe down shelves with a wet rag and vacuum the bottom of the closets.
• Decide what will go back in the closet.
• Work with the items until you have them organized in a way that suits you.
• Don’t forget to use what you have on hand to corral items. Look for baskets and bins around your home that could be used in the closet to help you organize everything.

How do you organize your extra closets?