Organizing The Closet Shelves With Bins

That is right. I pulled a Benita Larsson. For anyone who does not know her, she’s the mastermind organizer over at Chez Larsson and I adore how plain, functional, and striking her Swedish home/lifestyle is. So this swift little closet update totally reminds me of her clean/organized/wish-I-was-that-on-top-of-things house that I adore. Benita, among nine other especially secret guest bloggers, in fact pulls a little cameo appearance in our book, but that is a whole distinct story (speaking of which, a million and one thanks to everyone who was insanely sweet and made me glad-cry repeatedly after our little book announcement yesterday). But let us cut to the chase. This is simply a plain tale about some plain white bins. See, thanks to rearranging things in the bedroom, it meant that I now looked directly into our unorganized closet while lying in bed.

Oddly sufficient, the baskets and various piles of half-folded clothes never bothered me before our furniture shifting spree, but staring at them every night before closing my eyes… well, it got old.

So I chose something lighter, cleaner, and more consistent (aka: the same thing on every shelf) would do the trick. Originally I was thinking white baskets, but when I glanced at these babies on a shelf in the organizing section at Ikea (they are in fact meant to be “waste sorting bins”) the light bulb went on. Literally, I think everyone around me saw something floating above my head go “ding!” and I ran up and grabbed six of them in about ten seconds. Although you will notice that I turned them around so the indent for the handle is not visible. It simply looked cleaner and less busy that way (and they are still straightforward sufficient to grab and slide out like any other drawer full of socks, underwear, pjs, shirts, and shorts – all of which they now contain).

So after a little bit of closet organization (ex: donating that old shredder and putting our old booster seat up in the attic where we store other kid-stuff that Clara has outgrown), things went from looking like this…

… to this…

Here is the bottom of the closet before…

… and after…

Much better, right? We also thought it could be lively to write on the containers with dry erase markers if we hoped to mark what was in each one – mehaps in a lively scripty font? – but for now John’s been doing simply fine locating his stuff without labels (the bulk of the items in these bins are his since my stuff is in the dresser in our room). And we are certainly loving the clean look. Luh-uv-ing it. Especially me from the bed. Our bedtime chats now go like this:

John: Goodnight Burger, goodnight lady-wife. I enjoy you.

Sherry: Goodnight Burger, goodnight hubs. I enjoy you.

(silence)

Sherry: Goodnight new bins. I enjoy you.

John: (audible eye roll)

At $6.99 per bin, this swift little closet update clocks in at around $40, which is not pennies, but could easily have been the cost of about four similarly-sized baskets at most stores (and I enjoy that these can be wiped down/soaked since they are not woven!). So two twenties is worth the pre-zzzzzzzz serenity. And the audible eye rolls from John. Woot. Have you folks been up to any organizational upgrades? Has your view of a room changed after you rearranged it that snowballed into another upgrade because of that? Or have you found bins or boxes meant for one thing and used them for something else entirely?

Psst- In the whole trying-to-clean-slash-organize vein, here are over 50 other posts on that subject.