organized kids' closets

January 19, 2019

organized kids' closets

notice a pattern here? organizing everrrrrrythaaaang! one of the other things hubby and i wanted to do was make more functional storage in the kids' rooms. when we were putting together ava's nursery and z's big boy room i saw a picture like this on pinterest

and i thought it would be a great option for storage for the kids because then i could use the bottom hangers to hang up some clothes or outfits for them to choose on a daily basis. well, i tried that with the kids but it didn't really work quite as well as i thought it would and then basically the entire area on the bottom right and left of the vertical shelving unit was unused space that wasn't very functional.

so when hubby and i were thinking about how to make the closets and rooms for the kids more functional, one of the ways was to eliminate the system above. we thought it would be better to lay the 1x4 shelf horizontally and actually to put 2x4's in the closets instead of the 1x4.

so in each of the kids' rooms they had a 1x4 in the closet and in z's room he had a 1x4 horizontally on his floor for toy and book storage. we wanted to use what we had and supplement with new stuff that was needed. we decided to take the 1x4's in each of the kids' rooms and lay them horizontally in z's closet and screw them together so it would be one 2x4 unit. then we move the 1x4 from z's room into ava's room (at some point ikea changed their expedit systems to kalax and they were slightly different so that's why we moved z's into ava's room and put the ones from the closet into z's closet, the one from z's room was the old expedit and didn't exactly fit with the kalax as the dimensions were a little off). then we bought a 2x4 for z's room and a 2x4 for ava's closet and some of those cloth bins.

we went on our ikea trip, thanks to the grandparents for watching the kiddos, to get all of our closet stuff (including the closet system for the guest room, more on that in another post). came home, and then at some point started working on it all. i think my hubby is a pro at assembling ikea stuff now. after he installed everything, i organized all the kids' stuff, purged any broken toys, etc, and sifted through their clothes as well and then put it all back into the closet and the other storage systems.

it was a fairly small project, but made such a big difference in the available storage for the kids' rooms and closets. and it makes things more easily accessible to them. i still have toys on a shelf way on the top of the closet---these are the toys that have lots of small pieces that i want to supervise them with to make sure their rooms don't end up a carpet of legos and that they clean it up after they are done. i'm really glad we did this, we still have lots of cubbies that are open for storage for the future, it's not all stuffed full. well, i'm hoping that it will ever be stuffed full because that would mean they just have too much stuff. but as they get older they have room to grow as far as storage in their rooms.

so yay! next step is the guest room/nursery closet!

this is how z's room looked when we changed it from a nursery to his big boy room, and it stayed like this for awhile until maybe last year when i moved his bed to under the window and his 1x4 storage to where the bed is here in this picture

this was how ava's nursery looked up until this post when we moved the rocking chair out and added a 1x4 storage in its place, oh and we had already moved out the 2 drawer side table and added some hanging book storage right there under the window