Linen Closet Organizing...

Call it spring cleaning or call it nesting, either way I have been wanting to clean out our linen closets for some time.  We have two in our hallway, one you would designate for towels since it's closer to the bathroom, and one that would be bed linens.  These lines became a bit grayed, items were folded and stuffed in any which way, and it had been driving me nuts for months.

Our closets had not been relined since we moved in.  The previous owner had lined the shelves with this horrid floral tack paper.  They didn't even bother taking out the tacks from the liner before that!  The edges were all peeling up because the paper was only attached to the tops of the shelves, not wrapped around the front or anything.  You can see a sample of how this looked in the picture of the other linen closet below.

Finally I'd had enough.  I consulted my resident expert, Martha Stewart, on the best approach to cleaning up our act.  I had my birthday recently and I'd put a few of her books on my Wish List, one being her Homekeeping Handbook.  For closets she recommends taking inventory of what you have first, getting rid of items you haven't used in a few months.  Then for towels, sort the items by room then by size.  We have two bathrooms, the master and the hall bath.  We had a million old towels from even college days, so it felt so good to get rid of them.  I saved a few to put in our fish tank and I used one old one for pieces I'll eventually try to make wipes out of.  Other than that it left two sets for the master, and two sets for the hall bath.  Also in the hall bath I needed to include baby hooded towels and washcloths.

I removed all remnants of the previous inhabitants, and lined the shelves in plain white.  Then, I went and got media storage baskets to hold the washcloths.  The master hand towels and washcloths are in a DVD basket on the second shelf and the baby washcloths are the right width for a CD basket on the fourth shelf between the two types of towels for the hall bath.  We have space at the bottom of this closet to store our random sleeping bags, and the top shelf is holding our TP, tissues, and baby bath seats.  The space at the top of the closet is under utilized for sure.  Perhaps an additional shelf in the future might be nice.  We even have one more shelf I could put more items in (I put our case of wipes there for now), but since the closet has such a nice clean look at the moment, I don't want to randomly stuff anything in there.

I've taken the first step with the bed linen closet (status seen in top picture above) and cleaned out the items we don't use anymore, but that's as far as I've taken it as of today.  That might be my Sunday project!