Organizing the Master Bedroom Closet

Let me just start by saying that anyone who has to do a serious clean-up and organization of any closet less than six months after moving into a house is in need of help, especially if they claim to be a normally organized person. Yes, you can just read me into that sentence.

Of course, there would seem to be a very good reason for some of this disorganization. In our house it has a name.

Baseball Cards.

There were two things I was looking forward to when we finally moved into a nice, big house. One was not having anything under my beds, because I didn't want anything there and for the last 20+ years I've had to store things there for lack of other places to put things.

Two was not having baseball cards in my master bedroom closet. Now it might have been a good idea to share this with Hubby, but then I would have gotten the, "Then where do you propose I put them," comment. And at the time I hadn't put much thought into it.

But when we started carrying things in the house and Hubby handed off a box of cards to Sparky and said, "Take these to my closet," I physically cringed. What was I to do? Because while we have a nice, big house, we don't have an excess of closet storage. Yes, we have a basement, but it's not finished, and it's not really ideal for baseball card storage. Neither is the garage.

So if I wanted them out of my closet, I had to find a place for them. Enter The Organizing Junkie's closet round-up and Hubby gone out of town for a week, and I was in business.

Here are the before pictures of my closet, and I'll admit right up front that it's not just the baseball cards.






Since I invaded another closet in this re-do, I'll go ahead and show you before pictures of it too. It's a closet that is in our rec room, a room basically the size of our three-car garage that it is built over. It has a wire hanging closet shelf that the builder put in. I've used it primarily for toy tub storage.

The first thing I did was move the blue tubs down to the basement, then I stacked the four clear tubs on top of each other. I had some stackable shelving that's made for shoes from our old military quarters that we'd been storing in the garage and not using. We'd actually used it to store Buddy's baseball card books on their sides when we lived in Virginia, but we weren't using them now. I pulled them up into the left side of this rec room closet for the majority of Hubby's larger baseball card boxes, and then put some of the odds and ends on the top along with the statuesque little men.

I stacked the vaults, which are longer, in the open floor space between the shelves and the plastic bins on the right side.


After I moved out all the baseball cards, except for two vaults I left on the top shelf, I was able to clean out and organize the rest of my closet. I did not empty the closet out like The Organizing Junkie suggested, but remember I had lived here less than six months!

Here are pictures of the finished master bedroom closet:

In the picture above, that's my clothes hamper you see in the far left tucked under my short clothes, and then my little (Ikea) step stool since I'm a shorty. My white duvet cover with my winter weight (Ikea!) duvet are stored up on the top shelf.

In the picture below, you can see my upstairs tool box down on the floor where all those baseball cards used to live (plus some empty space!).


The cubbies on the wire rack basically serve as linen closet storage for shampoos, soaps, and hygiene items. Um, because there is no linen closet. You probably already saw my towels up on the shelf in the first picture.

If you close the door, here is where my purse stash is located.

I'm saving up for an Elfa closet system, like maybe in a year or two. But for now, it's clean and I can walk in without stepping on anything, and I like that a lot.

And the fact that the baseball cards aren't in there make me so happy I can't even find the words to adequately express it. The fact that Hubby has been back in town for about four hours and hasn't noticed doesn't bode well. I guess when he reads the post he'll know.

Go visit Laura, The Organizing Junkie, to see more closet and cupboard makeovers.

You might also be interested in this post: Organization — Spices