Walk Through Your Walk-in Again

Little helpers can also contribute to closet chaos too!

Having a walk-in closet can be a blessing. There's all the room you need to store your clothes and anything else. It can also be a curse. Why? Because it's a whole other room that has to be kept organized in order to function at its optimal level in order to keep you functioning at your optimal level!

I have a walk-in closet and it is a blessing to me. I am a girl who loves storage after all! However, there are some things that have always bothered me about my closet. For one thing it is essentially a long hallway type closet. It has some built-in shelves but they aren't very functional and there's no drawers or places to keep shoes. All these things can of course be fixed with some custom closet solutions but like my mom always says, "When you have the time for a home-improvement project, you don't have the money. When you have the money, you don't have the time." And so it goes with my closet. :)

Here are some of the built-ins in my closet where I keep my winter sweaters. FYI you should never hang sweaters because it makes them get misshapen and stretched out. Always fold them instead! Well that's what I was trying to do but as you can see it wasn't working very well. All the piles kept ending up falling over as I searched for a particular sweater. And as the bottom two shelves were just one long shelf it made the piles even harder to keep neat.

Martha Stewart to the rescue! Fortunately for me she has a whole line of organization remedies at Home Depot and they come in awesome colors. Who knew you can have a color scheme in the closet, right? My "piles" of clothes were already separated by color and so I chose to to continue on with that tactic and put each color in its own drawer. Over board? I think not! It looks so neat and clean now. I love it!

I didn't have enough drawer space in my dresser for my intimates so I had been storing them in bins and shoe boxes that were always unorganized and hard to find. Not any more! I used an old book shelf of my kids' that I bought brand new at Wal-Mart (several years ago) for less than $20. And thanks to some cute little baskets from the dollar store, my panty hose, bathing suits, sports bras, slips, and bras are all together again!

In another built-in I piled my jeans as neatly as I could and separated them by category as well; lights, darks, skinnies, etc. Another recycled bookshelf houses my out of season shoes.

Finally, every good walk-in closet has a hamper inside it. Not for your dirty clothes but for the ones you no longer need or want. Once the hamper is full, then you know it's time for a trip to Goodwill.

A bona fide California Closet may still be in my future someday but for now I am happy with how my closet is functioning. It's a breath of fresh air to enter it in the morning and be able to find what I need without a lot of hectic searching. What I love the most is none of these solutions cost me a lot of money.

Who doesn't love that?!?