ORGANIZATION: LINEN CLOSET REFRESH

While on the mainland, my husband was home and cleaned the entire house for me! However, the closets got neglected. Closets are easy to forget about because they can hide. I’m not complaining though! Even though spaces like this can be hidden, for me personally, I know the mess is there and it sits in the back of my mind. I can’t forget about it. Even if I don’t see that space for weeks it stresses me out. The closet that was the easiest and quickest to clean was the linen closet. Yes, this closet was a disaster, but I got excited when I saw it because it motivated me to go through it again and purge.

First thing I did was take almost everything out of the closet. (Side note: this house didn’t have a linen closet when we moved it. We converted an upstairs coat closet into our linen closet.) Then I went through each item and set aside everything we haven’t used in awhile or that we didn’t need anymore. I actually didn’t get rid of that much, just a couple beach towels, bed sheets and put a few things in their proper home. Almost everything just needed its own spot and refolded the right way to fit in that spot.

We just bought the kids new beach towels at the Disney store. Our basket that is specifically for beach towels was already overflowing, but I decided that all our beach towels need to fit in that one basket. If it doesn’t fit, some need to go. If you bring something new in, try to say goodbye to something you already have to cut down the excess. I also just got another Hearth and Hand sheet set for our bed because I loved them so much, so we got rid of an old set.

There is a chart at the bottom of the post, but I store all our pillowcases and bed sheets in these striped boxes. Before we PCS’d, we decided we were only going to keep 1 extra set of sheets for each bed and 1 set for our air mattress for when people come to visit. We also got rid of a good amount of blankets and comforters as well. Now we only have two extra blankets besides out winter blankets that are vacuum sealed for when we don’t live on a hot island.

This time around, I decided to organize the boxes by putting all our flat sheets in one and all the fitted sheets in the other. By organizing it this way instead of by sets, I was able to fit more in each box. The next thing to tackle was the huge number of pillow cases. My grandmother has been making me pillowcases since I was little and she continued making them for my kids. I will never get rid of them. To save some space, I folded them a different way so that they were thinner and I was able to get from three boxes down to two.

My goal for our linen closet was to be simple and functional. We live in a smaller home and we don’t have a lot of space; we don’t need a lot. Some new items I added were the two glass jars to hold our bath salt and bars of soap. They are small items that don’t necessarily need to be there, but I really like how it looks! I’ve noticed when I dress up my spaces even a little bit, I am more motivated to keep them clean.