Blogger’s Share Their Best Organizing Tip(s) – Part VI

Happy Thursday!  Welcome to the final instalment of January’s Getting Organized series.  Thanks to all the wonderful bloggers who gave us a peek into their their homes, closets and bathrooms.  Today, my two guest bloggers are talking about organizing in a toddler’s room and a basement.

Hi there. I am so excited to be sharing one of my favourite spaces with you today, our son’s closet. I think I am most proud of this space because we really took the time to plan it out and make sure it would work well. When we changed his room from a nursery to a big boy room, I noticed that he really didn’t have any hanging clothes {not many at least!}. So we moved everything to his dresser and took the doors off the closet.

That actually worked well too, because as the over protective mommy, I was always worried he would slam his fingers in those large, heavy doors.

So now the space is for his books and toys. The shelf above hosts some bankers boxes that I can store random things in. There will still be room for me to install a rod between the bookshelves and the wall when the time comes. The two bookshelves were mine when I was a child. It’s fun to see them used again. I also like that the wooden toys made by hand by our dear Great Grandfather now have a handsome place to rest. What also makes this space work is that there are plenty of bins and buckets for all of his toys. As long as they make it into one of those when it’s time to clean up, I am one happy mama! Thanks so much for letting me share one of our favourite organizational projects.

When we renovated our basement a couple of years ago, we created a hallway of lockers for storage.  Our initial thought was to assign one locker per child.  As it turns out, we decided to use each locker to store our seasonal gear and sporting equipment.

When you open each locker, we divided the space into thirds.  We designed a shelf above and below the main space and installed double hooks.

From left to right:

One locker houses our kids’ gear.  Things such as helmets, lacrosse sticks, sports pads, ice skates and roller skates all have their place.  The other lockers are organized by seasonal activity.  One locker stores tennis and golf equipment.  Another is filled with Summer items — life vests, boogie boards, cooler bags, waterproof totes and floatation rings.  The fourth locker is filled with mostly my husband’s random things —  a football, baseball gloves, his lacrosse sticks, coats and ski boots.

Because each locker is designated for an activity, it makes it easier to find things.  Everything is in one place.  If we had designated a locker per child or per person (i.e. one for our son, one for the girls to share, one for my husband and one for myself), then it would have been more difficult to pack up to go to an activity.  Imagine rummaging through 4 different lockers to collect helmets, or 4 sets of ice skates?  This system works really well for us because our kids are still young.  Maybe once our kids are teenagers everything will change, but either way, the best thing is no matter how neat or messy the insides are, you can shut the doors and not see all the clutter!