Our office, as is common these days, is set up in one of our extra bedrooms. This gives us a closet to work with for holding stuff.

The beauty of the closet is you can close the doors and no one has to see your mess!! Brilliant!

Our problem is we are working with the very decrepit closet organizational system we inherited with the house. I’m trying to make the most of this as at least we have something! We have a mess of plastic drawers and shelves and whatnot to help aid our organizational needs.

It is not perfect, but it works. What we are debating is possibly using those great cubby hole style “bookcases” in here. Thoughts? I like the top two shelves, they hold our games quite well. I’d like to keep those (or replace them more like but basically in the same fashion) and then do the rest as cubby holes. Those cubbyholes seem a great size for a great many things. That makes them just “Grrreeeeeat!” to me!

I’d love your thoughts on that.

Our office serves as home office when hubby works here, school room for the boys, game storage, hang out when kids come over to play games, and my crafting room. It is a little bit of everything for one little room!

When we moved in I sort of just stuck stuff in the closet and tried to make it work. I decided surely with a little effort I could improve on this. So yesterday I had the boys really clean the office itself.

Then I destroyed all their good work:

That’s me about halfway through. I removed everything (except the board games) from the closet. What a MESS!

Oh yes, it was quite the disaster!

I rearranged how I had the various plastic things set up and what was in them and the like. After just a couple of hours I had a newly organized closet and the big bonus? Somehow I found loads of extra room!

Don’t you love it when that happens?

This side of the closet has the boy’s school type stuff. The large three drawer chest is fantstic. I used to try to cram all their notebooks, folders, and lapbooks into those paper trays. They had far too many. I gave each boy a drawer and that seems to be the perfect solution! The top drawer is for our textile crafts – some knit scarves and 550 cord emergency bracelets and the like.

Above that you see the paper trays which are set up for some various printer type papers we have and some craft items. There’s two magazine holders house our Family Night packets, magazines, and the like. On the shelf above that we have some drawers holding markers, pencils, glue, and all that sort of good stuff. I also put up their science kits, DNA lab, and crime scene lab. I can slide the keyboard into the space on that side as well so that it can be kept safe when not in use.

The other corner of the closet is home to the crafty type stuff. Sir Megabyte’s art stuff, my scrapbooking, beading, and stamping stuff. The sad thing is I have a load of more stamps and no idea how to fit them in here. Yikes!

And here you can see the mess is gone and the front of the closet looks great! I think that this looks a lot better and that makes me real happy!

I’ve got some cubby holes that I use to hold our empty folders, notebooks, music books, art books, and etc. I even found our blank cd spindle! (Someone shoved something in front of it!)

I love organizing. Of course, I can’t afford to do everything I like, but I make do with what I have and try to find a way to make it work for us. I think this will buy us a lot of time while we take care of other projects like painting and our garden.

Have you organized anything today? What about needing to organize? It’s just about spring… what are you doing to spring clean your house? Any thoughts on my office closet?

–Lady O