Yep, another organization post. Sorry about that. But hopefully on Friday I’ll have a more exciting before and after (hint: it involves our kitchen). Anyway, our clothes are pretty organized right now – since we custom fitted our closets and this shirt filing system is still working wonders for me (Seriously, it’s been a few weeks and it’s still as organized as the picture I showed you. That’s the first time that’s happened to me, people. This stuff is awesome, not to toot my own horn.)

One of the closets was still an embarrassment, though: our “broom” closet. Here’s the messy before shot:

The main problem is that it doesn’t only hold our brooms. We also store our ironing board, iron, umbrellas, and vacuum with all its accessories. All in a 1.5×1.5 foot closet. Needless to say, it was cramped. But I knew that with a few things and very little money we could get it organized and everything would still fit. The plan was simple:

1. Hang the ironing board using a couple of hooks on the right wall. Since the right wall is a bit recessed (the closet door is narrower than the actual closet opening) the board will be more or less concealed even when you open it, but still accessible enough when we need to use it. Which I’ll admit, doesn’t happen that often. Ironing is one of my chores and it always takes me a while to get it done. We attached the hooks as high as we could but still leaving room the get the board out.
2. Add a (towel) rod to the front side of the closet, to use with some hooks from Ikea that we had from our kitchen, so that all the brooms, umbrellas and such can hang from those hooks. Again, we screwed the rod into place as high as we could without it interfering with the ironing board. Some of the hooks were a bit “narrow” and we couldn’t get the brooms to hang, so we (well, my boyfriend, really) used some pliers to make them wider.
3. Attach a couple of pieces that hold pipes into place to the left side of the closet. I’m not sure how these are called, so you should check the photos. They’re basically plastic “C”s that are used to hold plumbing, etc. onto the wall. We had these leftover from our outdoor kitchen project and thought they would be perfect to hold the vacuum accessories. We were right! We just screwed them into place after checking were we wanted each accessory to be.
4. Add an organization accessory from Ikea that keeps irons attached to the wall, also to the left side of the closet. We bought this a couple of years ago as soon as we moved in and it had been laying around ever since. We finally got around to hanging it, and I love it.
5. Now that the floor of the closet is clutter free, simply keep the vacuum on the floor!

Everything was super easy to do: basically just checking where we wanted things to be on the wall, and screwing hooks/rods/etc in place. And pretty cheap as well, since we had most of the supplies already: 2€ for the hooks (we still have some left over) + 6€ for the iron holder, so it was an 8€ project for us. But enough talking. Here are the after shots:

It’s hard to capture everything since the space is very small, but it’s perfectly organized now. And everything doesn’t tumbling down each time I open the door, so that’s a definite bonus.

What do you think? Money well spent? Would you have organized it in a different way? I’d love to know what works for you guys, since I’m still learning how to organize everything.

P.S.: If you had to buy the towel rod, this $13 one from Ikea would work perfectly, plus the corresponding S-hooks from the Kitchen department. And the pipe holders are probably no more than $2 at your local home improvement store.

What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments.