Organizing My House: Closet Edition

So I have 3 storage closets in my house. One downstairs and one in each of my 2 guest bedrooms upstairs. The downstairs closet looked like this:

Pretty embarrassing right?? Yeah, the ones upstairs were not any better. Basically there was no visible floor space, and sometimes things fell out when you opened the doors. I forgot to get pictures of the upstairs closets before I emptied them since I seem to get too excited about projects and totally forget to take pictures before I start cleaning. Oh well. Just trust me that they were terrible.

I tried to group things together that made sense and moved everything around to where it worked better. I actually had a few storage containers and a small set of plastic drawers already, and only had to invest in a couple more from target. We put a few big things in the attic, and I got rid of a good amount of junk that we just don't need.

So in this room/closet, I used one under the bed storage container for all my extra sets of sheets and pillow cases, and another one for all my scarves. Michael had 2 garment bags from his days in band and they were perfect for storing my rolls of gift wrap. Both bags also had big pockets on the back that were just the right size for storing my gift bags and boxes. The drawers store all the rest of my gift wrapping supplies, mailing supplies, and then all our blank notepads/spirals. There is also a tub that holds all my finished sewing projects. On the top right, those are just extra empty containers!!

The other upstairs closet was filled with tons of boxes with mostly old pictures, extra pictures frames, old cards, scrapbook stuff, etc that was junking up the closet. Turns out most of the boxes were only half filled so just emptying them freed up a ton of space. Basically, all that stuff fit in these drawers, plus there was an extra drawer available for me to store all my crafting supplies. The purple box holds our old VCR and movies and some extra cables/cords that Michael wanted to keep. The pink box and the clear containers at the top hold our old momentos from growing up.

The downstairs closet now holds one big tub with all our nintendo games, controllers, and old gaming systems, and the other one holds all our toys and kids books that we keep around for visitors. I moved most of the rest of the stuff that was in there earlier either upstairs or threw out so that left tons of room to put the chairs back in neatly. There is so much extra floor space in there now!

So there you have it, my closets now look amazing, and you know way more details about how it was done than you ever really wanted to. My next victim is going to be the cabinets under our bathroom sinks!