Organizing the Linen Closet

Happy New Year everyone!  I am so excited to be staring 2012 off with you!  Over at Ask Anna I am hosting a 14 day Get Clean & Organized Challenge and today I’m sharing with you one of my upcoming challenges {don’t tell my readers}!

I have been seeing so many beautifully organized linen closets on Pinterest that I was inspired to reorganize mine!  To organize your linen closet along with me you will need some baskets.  I purchased mine at Target, because I happened to have a gift card, but they also have great baskets at Wal*Mart and dollar stores.

In this picture you can see I tried the “rolling method” for my towels but I ended up nixing it.

Start by emptying out your linen closet.  I only use two shelves of my linen closet for the linens, the top shelf is for games {obviously we are lacking in that department} and the bottom shelf is for my medicines.

You can see how I organized those here.

Next categorize the items that came out of the closet: table linens, sheets, hand towels, bath towels, beach towels, etc.  Once you have all of your items in the right categories, decide which ones you’d like to put in baskets.  Not everything has to go in a basket and probably not everything will fit in a basket.  I decided to leave my towels out because they are pretty long and I didn’t like the way they fit in the baskets.  The items I put into baskets are: table linens, hand towels and sheets.  Everything else is folded neatly and placed on the shelf next to the baskets.

My linen closet is deep so I placed items, that I don’t use that often, in baskets behind the items that I use on a daily basis.

After placing all of the items back into the linen closet I made labels for each of the baskets using my new Silhouette! {Looooove it!}

I stole the cloths pin idea from Pinterest.  I thought it was a cute touch for a linen closet and I happened to have a lot of them left over from another project.

As you can see in the “before” picture, my linen closet was organized but it wasn’t very pretty.  Now I can look forward to putting away the laundry and getting to visit my new linen closet!  Oh, and if you’re wondering where all of the bulky stuff from the top shelf went, it’s in the top stair of my daughter’s bed.  That’s my favorite part of her bed: hidden storage compartments!!!

If you have trouble folding fitted sheets so that they fit nicely on a shelf, or in a basket, check out my tutorial on How to Fold a Fitted Sheet.

Thank you for letting me share my made over linen closet with you!  If you’d like to join me and hundreds of other for the rest of the 14 day Get Clean & Organized Challenge, I would love it!