Looking in the Linen Closet

I haven’t delighted you all with a Corners of My Home transformation in a while.  The last few weeks have been busy as Cub Scouts, Brownies, soccer, ballet and Mexican folkdancing (I still haven’t told you about that?) all started up.  Plus my parents are arriving for a visit today and I’ve been consumed with turning the storage room back into a guest room.  But in the process of doing that, I found a large moving box marked “linen closet” which was filled with, shockingly enough…linens.  Including the guest sheets and towels I’ve been missing.  But when I went to shove them into my linen closet, there wasn’t any room to spare.  So I took about an hour to reorganize it and here’s the results.

Our linen closet is pretty large, with attractive metal folding doors.  These are the top two shelves.  Try not to get hit in the head with a sheet when you open the door.

Here are the same shelves now.

Not a huge difference, but now every extra set of bed linens that we own is there on the top shelf.  We need to get rid of some.  I think all but 3 sets up there are flannel sheets.  My mom gets cold a lot, so she buys us flannel sheet sets.

Here’s the middle shelf.  Nice drawers.  Too bad they are half empty.  Or are they half full?

Behold!  Through the magic of the internet, here are the same drawers, now filled! They’ve got towels, swim diapers, seasonal garden flags, washcloths and extra pillow cases.

Finally the lower shelves.  No comment.

And now…

You can actually use the drawers on this shelf without having to move a ton of stuff out of the way.

What you can’t see in any of these pictures is the way that the lovely metal folding doors block off six to ten inches of space on either side of the shelves.  Design technology at it’s finest.  Not to mention that the shelves themselves are metal and that bottom shelf is covered in linoleum.

Here’s a look from the side, into the left space hiding behind the open doors.

And after:

It’s hard to tell the difference in the two pictures, except that I used a flash in the “after” one.  But the bottom shelf does show how there’s not just a ton of stuff waiting to fall out.  Those are “refrigerator gears” on the door.  Cute concept, cheap toy.  Don’t bother wasting your money.

The right side of the closet:

After:

Not the most dramatic of before and afters, but at least my linen closet is functional.  No more opening the doors and shoving things in just to avoid the mess.  I’ve really got to go through all those sheet sets and get rid of the ones we don’t use.  If I could whittle that pile down, I might be able to keep the sheets in the room in which they belong.  Clearing out that top shelf would really be helpful as I look to store other things around the house.

So there is this week’s corner.

While my parents are here I plan to attack our laundry room next.  I’ll keep you posted.

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