The summer schedule with kids at home has made hands-on organizing work a little slower. Doesn’t mean work isn’t happening behind the scenes. I’ve been working on a few company partnerships, designing spaces, and fine-tuning business stuff. I’ve also been digging into the archives to finally share projects from years back – and the client space being shared today is one of those.

Exciting news…To fill the sad organizing hole in my heart, I’m offering several video sessions! If you’re not local (or even if you are) and have an organizing challenge you’d love to talk through, you can chat with me LIVE for one-on-one sessions. These are SO fun and it’s amazing how much we can knock out in a short amount of time over video. You will also receive a copy of our video chat when the session concludes.

Sessions of 20 or 45 minutes are available tomorrow, Thursday, July 25. You can find the sessions available right here. We also have dates available in August and September.

BEFORE

This incredible project was completed nearly 2 years ago…and is still one of my favorite diy’s on a budget. This cute CUTE family of 5 had 2 challenging spaces – their daughter’s closet and a hall closet. Not wanting to spend a ton of money but desperately looking for a solution, they reached out for help.

Their daughter has a reach-in closet with sliding mirrored doors. In general these are tough, but hers are pretty wide – so she has great reachability on either side. Sliders make it tough to access anything in the middle of the closet. In this case, it wasn’t so bad and was easy to view each side as its own individual section.

Here’s the closet before on the left…

And on the right…

At first glance I spied a lot of great product we could re-purpose…and that’s exactly what we did. No need to buy new when you already have great pieces. (I’ll be sure to links to the products at the end of the post for you) The other issue I noticed was her large amount of hanging space that was being unused.

Their other space was a hallway closet used for games, books and crafting items…

This closet isn’t in the entry, so I thought it was interesting it would be set up as one. You can see the standard one shelf there – the rod was removed, so it was clearly intended to be a coat closet. So strange again because of its location…way up the hall and near the master bedroom. I saw this closet as an easy fix.

Basically, I saw both closets needed just additional shelves to make them totally functional and organized.

DEMO, PAINT AND NEW SHELVES

To brighten their daughter’s closet, we removed the existing rods and shelves for a fresh coat of paint…

I made additional shelf cuts and they were all sprayed outside in the front walkway.

For the hall closet, I added a simple wall of Elfa shelving – 7 shelves in total…

( elfa shelving systems )

AFTER

The after was exactly what I was hoping for this sweet little girl…

( shelf divider | shoe boxes )

I created new zones with most of her clothing relocated to the left side. I left a section of double hang on this side and space for shoes on the totally cleared floor.

On the right side, I left a small section of lower hanging and the rest of the space was outfitted with new shelves for her toys, memory items, special things, jewelry, accessories and more…

( white and black baskets )

Again, I just repurposed the storage containers she already had.

However, the one small update I did make was better drawer quality. The previous free-standing Elfa drawer system had the drawers with big holes. Unfortunately, they don’t sell the drawer liner for these drawers and her small American Girl doll items were falling through the wire squares. I updated to the fine mesh drawers and gave her much more storage space…instead of 3 drawers, she now has 5…

( mesh drawer set )

Love that you can update an Elfa system over time…they are never going to discontinue this bad boy, so if you have children this system is a safe bet!

Check out their organized game and book closet…

SO much better!!

Loved helping them with these 2 spaces and bringing it in on a budget. Getting organized doesn’t require a huge spend. I love adding more space by way of inexpensive shelf cuts or a simple Elfa shelving set-up. And always love using the containment you already own.

SHOP THE POST

Here’s a list of items either I purchased or she already had in her home:

Elfa Shelving (for the hall closet)

White Mesh Drawer Set

Weave Baskets

Shelf Divider

Shoe Box

If you have a space like this or any other challenging space, these are a perfect example for something we can chat about LIVE on a video call. It’s easy and I can set you up with a game plan to go knock it out!

Hope you guys are having a great summer! The temps were mild for a while but it’s been heating up the last few days. Hard to believe July is nearing the end and we’re heading into back to school mode…but I am pretty excited to get back on a schedule so these projects can get rolling.

Back soon with more guys!

xx,

Sam

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