This place, the closet room, is hands-down my favorite place in the house we are renting. After living here for a few months, I'm practically convinced that it should be illegal to build a home without one. It gives us a "home" for our miscellaneous items and is less congested than an actual closet. And if it is so helpful to Nathan and I, I can't imagine how awesome it would be for a family with children. So, all of you who are planning on building a house someday, take note.
This is what you see coming in from the garage. I like having our coats right here- no need to trek across the house to the coat closet when we're leaving from the backdoor. And for those of you with males in your life, minimizing the number of motions it takes to put things away is a plus. Here, there is no closet door to open and shut- simply hang up as you walk in the door. I've found the same thing to be true for laundry. After unsuccessfully trying a hamper with a lid in Nathan's bathroom, I changed to just putting an open laundry basket in there. Voila! From then on, his clothes magically made it into the hamper.
Speaking of laundry, having a laundry basket in this space has been great. Our laundry room is in the basement, so I'm usually not motivated enough to run down there with dirty towels and such from the kitchen. But, it is easy to step into this room and drop laundry into the basket. And if one of us is coming in dirty from outdoor work, exercise, or sports, this is a good spot to drop dirty clothes, rather than dragging the dirt through the house.
Keeping our cleaning supplies all in one plastic box has been really helpful. When I'm cleaning, I just carry the whole box from room to room with me, which makes it go faster since I'm not constantly running back to a specific place for supplies. The other container in the picture holds disposable paper goods.
I keep extra paper towels, lightbulbs and such on the top shelf, and then have room below for ironing essentials and a basket of cleaning rags.
A bowl for keys and a basket for random things we might bring in with us.
I really like these pull-out baskets. I would imagine with kids it would be a great place for little hats and mittens, backpacks, etc. We use the top drawer for disposable bags and the bottom for small reusable totes.
When we lived in our apartment, the small space forced us to find methods of organization. It was nice to start out that way to get in the habit of being efficient with our space. It also made it a lot easier to move- we didn't have a lot of random odds and ends to pack up. We got a gift card to Target last Christmas and used it to buy a lot of plastic containers. Here I have one for gift bags, a small one for bows and ribbons, and then a bag of pool items- towels, sun screen, goggles- waiting for next summer.
These shelves hold odds and ends of tools (usually there are more there on that bottom shelf, but Nathan has them out at the house we're remodeling), toys my little siblings play with when they come over (I'm the cool sister because I have a marshmallow gun and an air cannon), scrapbooking supplies and gift wrap. I'm sure there's a lot more that could be done with this space if we needed it to.
And that brings us to the end of your tour of my favorite room in my house!
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