$40 Laundry Closet Makeover

In my last post about my laundry room, I showed you how I transformed my blank slate into a functional and cute space. I wasn't ready to show you the closet though ... until now!

Here are the "before" pictures. It's a sliding closet door, so I have to take pictures one at a time.

Pretty sad, and a pretty bad use of space. I had this dumb little hanging wrapping paper organizer, which hardly held any wrapping paper rolls and bows, and leaned forward with the weight of the rolls, which always bothered me. I just stuffed all of my bags and bows into the plastic storage container on the right, making it very difficult to find what I needed!

A quick trip to the hardware store and the Dollar Tree and just $40 later, I wound up with this:

Much better, right?!

 I spent $30 on these two 36-inch wire shelves to make use of the vertical space I was losing out on, since I don't hang anything from the closet rod anyway. Here's a side-by-side look:

 

This is just a much better use of the space. And please ignore the gross cat litter box in the bottom right, but it's got to go somewhere! To explain all the bottles, they're what's left of our five-year supply of household cleaners that came with our water softener unit. They're pretty much a waste of space because I buy the nicer stuff in stores anyway, but it's good to have back-up in case we need it.

For my gift wrapping station, I just sorted my bags into categories, and labeled baskets for each category, as well as tissue and tags, ribbons and bows. I can stash my gift boxes off to the side, as there is some room between the baskets and the wall.

Down below, I came up with this idea for storing my wrapping paper rolls:

I had some elastic from the craft store, and simply staple-gunned it to the walls to create a little cozy spot to hold my rolls up. Here is a close-up:

And here's what I did to sort our laundry and keep it tucked away inside the closet:

 

Pretty ingenius if I do say so myself ... for a whopping $4. I used three Dollar Tree bins and a pack of Dollar Tree knock-off Command Hooks to hang them, which are surprisingly durable! Well, I can say that I've had each of these bins full of laundry overnight and they didn't fall down, so I'm thinking we're good to go. As for the labels, I'm still relying on handwritten tags to do the trick. They're not very fancy, but I'm trying to keep things as cheap and easy as possible!

So that's my $40 makeover! Just like the washer and dryer space on the opposite side of the room, everything has its perfect little place. Now, wrapping gifts and sorting laundry will be as enjoyable as possible :)

Here's one last look at my little creation: