Project Simplify: The Linen Closet

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It is already week 3 of project simplify. This weeks task was closets, counter tops and drawers. Being the snail pacer that I am I decided to pick one hot spot in those areas  to make over.

I chose the linen closet. As I have stated before, we bought our current home for just under $10,000. Now real estate is very inexpensive in our town, but $10,000 is still way less than the price of an average home in our area. Which meant that our home came with a few remodeling projects required a top to bottom gut and redo.

What was fun about the whole process was getting to decide how to best use each and every space. One such space was under the attic stairs, that are against the wall of the upstairs hallway.

My hubby and I decided the space would be best utilized by adding a study nook in the shorter portion and a linen closet in the taller portion. I was thrilled to finally after 10 plus years of marriage have a home with a linen closet.

So you can understand my frustrations when I open up that dreamed of linen closet and find this.

At our old house, our linens were stored in a bedroom closet. I used these banana boxes to help stack them up in some type of order.

The system worked great when the children were small. However, now that the children are bigger and took over the folding of laundry and putting away the sheets and towels the system is not working at all.

Knowing that this week of project simplify was coming and that the linen closet was my top hot spot in the area of closets, counter tops and drawers, I thought long and hard about how to fix the mess.

Then one day when I was out for a run it hit me. My kids need a self imposed boundary of just how big their folded sheets can be. What a better boundary than a box. Better yet a box with a lid.

So I dug in my coupon filer, and found 2, $5 off a $20 purchase coupons for Dollar General. If you have Dollar General in your area I highly recommend signing up for their emails, since they generally send out at least one of  these coupons a month.

To sign up simply go to their website home page (click on words in blue) and a pop up should come up asking you to sign up. If the pop up doesn’t come up scroll down and you will find a place to sign up at the bottom of the page.

I use these coupons all the time to purchase things I need in my organizing, and on this day I bought these 14 shoe box sized totes for the price of what 11 should have cost me.

I used 10 of them in this project, and put the other 4 in my attic for another hot spot I plan to attack at a later date.

I again did what I did in week one and week two of project simplify and dumped out the entire contents of the closet into one big pile.

I then folded each sheet set into a bucket of its own. I then place the boxes of sheet sets on the shelves. I put the sets of the shortest child on the lowest shelves and the sets for my husband and I on the higher shelves so that everyone should be able to access their sheets easily when it comes time to change them and when it is time to put clean ones away.

Those two loose sheets you see on the top shelf are sheets my husband and I use to make a bed out of our couch when either one of us is ill or having trouble sleeping so that we don’t make the other ill or keep the other up. It is how we create marital harmony.

Since we tend to grab those sheets in the middle of the night, I wanted them extremely easy to grab.

I also had a whole box of sheets to give away which went to the local mission with the clothes on Saturday.

I am so happy with the results I keep opening the door and sneaking a peak. I explained the system to the rest of the family so hopefully we can all work together and keep it up.

How about you? How do you make your linen closest work for your family?