Organization

This week we took advantage of the extra hour to work on some linen closet organization. There is just something about a freshly organized closet that makes me super happy. Ah, it is the little things like purging old junk and storing supplies in matching boxes to make it a good week.

When we started working on our home gym we pulled all the craft supplies out of the closet in that room and have been “storing” it on the guest room floor for the past three months. It has been difficult to find supplies for our projects. I was anxious to create a system so the next time Brent asks me where our double sided tape is I can give him a definite answer rather than “somewhere on the guest room floor”. Life is glamorous sometimes over here at Gray House Studio.

We have been planning on building a craft cabinet but other projects have come along and bumped it further down our to-do list so we started looking for a quick solution to get all the stuff off the floor (so our guests don’t have to walk through a maze of paints and pencils to get to their bed) and decided that our hall linen closet would be the perfect place to store all of our craft supplies.

Here is what our linen closet looked like this time last week. There were some sheets, some blankets, pillow cases, towels, etc. It resembled a linen closet but there just seemed like so much wasted storage space. It isn’t a huge closet but if organized properly, I was sure we could fit both linens and craft supplies in this space.

The first thing we did was pull everything out of the closet and create an even bigger mess in the guest room and the hall and the entry way. Doesn’t it seem like you have to create a mess to organize a mess? I like starting organization projects with a blank slate so I can get a good idea of how much space I am actually working with.

The one thing that holds me back from organizing is money. It is a dream of mine to have all our cabinets, drawers and closets neatly organized with matching baskets, bins and boxes but I can’t ever seem to pull the trigger on purchasing these items because you can’t just buy one or two you have to buy several and they can add up quick.

This closet was going to take a plethora of boxes because we needed to store a lot of small items like glue bottles, ribbon, tape, pencils, etc. We ended up using three different sizes of the TJENA boxes in black from IKEA.

The price was great ($3.99 for the large box that came with an option to add compartments, $1.99 for the smaller box, and $3.99 for a two pack of the magazine files).

They were paper boxes so I was skeptical about how sturdy they would be but we are very pleased with the quality. They are easy and quick to assemble. I used our label maker to create labels for each of the boxes to create a uniform look.

The large box comes with another piece that you can add to break up the inside into small compartments. It was perfect for storing all of our left over ribbon, yarn, twine, etc. I also used these large boxes to store paper and fabric scraps. I’m just over here in organization heaven.

We use our colored pencils the most for sketching project ideas. I wanted to create an easy way to grab them out of the closet but I didn’t want to spend any money.

I took one of my old candles from Bath & Body Works that just had a tiny amount of wax at the bottom and cleaned it out using a trick I found online which involves pouring boiling hot water into the jar so all the wax can come up to the top of the jar. I let it cool for a few hours so then I could just pop the wax and the wicks out. It works great and I like finding ways to recycle these jars.

After I cleaned it out really well, I spray painted it and stuck my favorite chalk tape onto it. It was a fast, easy and free storage solution.

Once all of our craft supplies were nicely organized in the top half of the closet, I started working on arranging the linens in the bottom half. We purchased two inexpensive wire baskets from HomeGoods. In these we are storing our extra sheets and pillowcases. Eventually I would love for all these to match. All white pillowcases and sheets for guests would be ideal and for the designer in me, look a lot nicer matching in the closet.

We store all the guest towels in the guest bathroom, all of our blankets in our living room ottoman and the extra blankets in the guest room closet. We just don’t have a ton of extra linens to fill up an entire closet in this stage of our life.

What a difference, no more wasted space! Does it mean that we are not grown ups yet if we have more craft supplies then linens in our newly organized linen closet?

It may seem like a strange choice, but Brent and I like making spaces work for us and to use them to create solutions to solve our storage problems or fit our interests and our recent linen closet organization project is the perfect example of just that.

We designed and built a wall-mounted yoga mat rack out of wood to hang on the wall in our home gym.

We were back at work on a new DIY project for our home gym this weekend. We built a yoga mat rack to hang on the wall in our gym.

Now before you go thinking Brent and I are a pair of yoga masters, let me stop you right there and say we are not.

In fact it is safe to say we have a long way to go in the flexibility department. We use an iPad app and follow along with a virtual instructor so she is never too strict with us.

Now that I had my new yoga mat we needed a place to store our mats. We designed and built our yoga mat rack that we hung on the wall in our home gym.

Our yoga mat rack was designed to hold two yoga mats and our foam roller. It is a great solution if you want a place to store your mats that takes up little space and makes them readily available.

We’ve got the tutorial on how to make our yoga mat holder below.

*** Thanks so much for supporting our small shop – Moon Rock Prints – this holiday season! ***

How To Build A Yoga Mat Rack

Our completed rack is ready to hold some yoga mats! Like I mentioned earlier it could also be made to hold rolled up towels or to use as shelves to display smaller items.

By building and installing our yoga mat rack this weekend we are on our way to filling up the big empty wall in this room. The perk of being late in the game to pick out yoga mats is that I could match them to the rug in this room.

Even though the rack is meant for storage and organization purposes, we still wanted it to stand out as a good-looking decor piece for the room and I think Brent did a fantastic job making it happen.

How we went about organizing our prantry with chalkboard tape

One of my Christmas presents from my parents this year was a roll of chalkboard tape and a chalk marker. I was so pumped. My parents know and understand my love of office supplies so well. I’m not sure if this stuff is fairly new or I have just been oblivious to it in the stores but I am going to guess it is the former because I’m usually pretty on top of the latest tape craze. I’m not ashamed to admit I have bought decorative duck tape before for no real reason other than it had Super Mario on it (I ended up giving it to my brother) and impulsively buy washi tape just about every time I got to Target. Because you know, you can never have too much of that stuff for projects.

I immediately started to look for a place I could use my chalkboard tape in our home. I think I was scaring Brent with some of my suggestions. Then it hit me. I could use it for labels on my OXO food storage container set that Brent got me for Valentine’s Day last year. I was only kind of utilizing them but had not really taken the time to actually migrate all our food from packages to storage containers because I was still trying to figure out how to label them. Chalkboard tape was my answer.

How I Organized our Pantry with Chalkboard Tape

To organize our pantry I used: food storage containers, a roll of chalkboard tape and a chalk marker, that’s it! Well, besides all the other storage stuff I swiped from my mom when she was purging her own pantry. Score! I realize this concept of using food storage containers with chalkboard labels in the pantry is nothing new or even remotely unique. What really made the difference for me is using the chalkboard tape. There are a lot of chalkboard labels out there but they were so small and too decorative in appearance. I had a hard time writing on them and fitting in everything I needed to write. Plus they didn’t cover much of the container and I could never get them to erase very well.

^^^ I loved that the chalkboard tape was already the perfect height. All I had to do was cut it to the width of the container. Plus, it offers a modern appearance and a realistic writing surface size. I also found that it wipes off really easy.

^^^ Let me just say using a chalk marker also makes the world of difference. Have you ever tried to write with chalk on a very tiny surface? It’s hard. There was almost no point in me even bothering writing with the chalk on those tiny chalkboard labels because half the time Brent couldn’t even read what I wrote anyway.

^^^ My mom gave me this idea, which I think is brilliant! Her suggestion was to use the chalk marker and write on the back of the storage container the date I bought the food and the date it expires. Which is a really good point because once you transfer the food to the storage container and throw away the package, you no longer have the reference. And I don’t know about you but I have enough to remember besides when I bought a package of rolls. I just made a little note on the back of the container with a B and the date I bought it and an E and the date it will expire. The chalk marker works really well for this because it writes on smoothly and wipes off really easily once you reload the container with new food. Note: I would like to mention that the photo above is from when I organized my pantry about a month ago. I promise we are not still eating rolls that are about a month past their expiration date.

We don’t have a lot of food in our pantry right now because there are just two of us and we usually only buy food for a week at a time. Plus, I am a little obsessive about throwing out expired food every week on trash day. So the whole organizing the pantry process only took a few hours one afternoon.

Both Brent and I agree it feels nice to have an organized pantry. Below is what it looks like now.