Family Closet

[blondie]

Does anyone have one ?

We are gonna do it. :dance

I have a huge laundry room and we are just gonna have to move a few things around and buy some more storage bins.


Less laundry hauling + more space in our bedrooms = win!

[OneLove]

I've never thought of that :doh but what a genius idea! Now we just need a house with a laundry room lol

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[ValiantJoy07]

I have it all drramed out ...some day :giggle

[StewardofLOs]

We live in a tiny apartment with two bedrooms, and we all cosleep (for the moment), so yeah, we have that :yes It also doubles as the school room. :) It's nice because I have all my stuff together to get ready in the mornings and don't have to worry about waking up the kids. :tu

[mipennsn]

We did in one house. We slept on the 2nd floor with almost no closets in the bedrooms. Downstairs their was 1 bedroom with a good size closet that everyone's clothes when in, plus we had room for 2 dressers in that room as well. In the laundry room I stored the out of season clothes.

[blondie]

I'm OBSESSING over this. :roll We already have a big stack of plastic drawers for DH's stuff, some pet supplies, and some spare kitchen stuff- there are 11 of them. We decided to get 22 more!! I'll have 33 drawers. :melting

O's dresser is gorgeous and sturdy, so we are keeping it for pajamas and just a few outfits to keep upstairs. Maybe toys or extra bedsheets. It was my auntie's, so I'll probably keep it forever. Our dresser and H's dresser STINK. The drawers are either too deep, or too shallow, and they don't pull out nicely. I'm a tiny bit bummed to get rid of them, because they come from my side of the family and they match our bed, but I want a bigger bed within the next few years, AND I want to make room in our room and the baby room for more kids. :giggle So that's good. I think my parents will take them.

I need to do a good purge of some clothes and socks and stuff.

[3boysforme]

I wanna see a picture when you're done. :popcorn

[blondie]

You know it! <3 We have a huge cabinet to clean out and move, then buy all the drawers and screw them to the wall/to each other. Then I get to ORGANIZE.

Poor DH. :no I'm so annoying. :grin

[blondie]

Here are my drawers! :dance :jump

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v131/bellefille/0407131557-00.jpg
I'm slowly working on getting all of our clothes moved into there. I'm going to blog about it when it's all done and show where I have everything. I never found much info on family closets when I was planning this, so I'm hoping it will help people!

[shekinah]

Wow! That will be awesome. I have always wanted to do this, just have a giant area like a walk in closet. It doesn't make sense for us in our current place because the laundry is in a closet in the bathroom which is right next to our bedroom anyway. And I like the full length mirrors on my closet doors :D But I really want to do it if we have a real laundry room some day. I'd love to put up a bunch of racks and just hang everything. I want my dresser out of my room to free up space and don't want to have every room with their own once kids are in the picture.

[NeshamaMama]

We have one in the floorplan of our new house! :jump I'm so excited for it! I have a couple neat pins on Pinterest of different setups, I'll come.back and link to them :)

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[Autumn]

:rockon That'll be great!

We have one and I love it :yes Way nicer!

[blondie]

I won't have to haul laundry up the stairs anymore. :melting
Except towels and some diapers, and my work/going places clothes.

[staceylayne]

Ooh, ooh, we do! :raise

Ours just kind of came together out of frustration without much planning. :giggle I'm sure it could awesomer if I'd have laid it out with intention or gotten to work it into the floor plan from the get go (:melting at that idea!).

Even though it's imperfect I love, love, LOVE our family closet!! :heart I figure when B is old enough to want some privacy with his dressing then we'll move his stuff upstairs to his room. But wowie is it convenient to have everyone's stuff in one place!!

Not sure if I've taken any "after" pics...lemme see if I can get some together.

[NeshamaMama]

I would love some combination of these two ideas:
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/m/photos/0,,20576261_21130115,00.html

http://biblicalhomemaking.blogspot.com/2013/03/homemaking-hack-2-family-closet.html?m=1
(The pics down toward the bottom, not the Duggars' :doh)

How big of a space do all of you have yours in? Do you combine it with your laundry room?

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[Blue-EyedLady]

I have this, sort of. All of our clothes and the sheets are in the master bedroom, and all of us sleep in the boy's room (theoretically). I just have a bunch of random dressers and stuff, so the room is ringed with dressers along each wall. The closet in the room has all our hanging clothes. I only hang up our dress clothes, so we don't need a ton of space for that. And the shoes are on shelves in the bottom of the closet. It's pretty low-key, actually. I didn't buy anything special to set it up. I do love that room, though...

[blondie]

I looked at that second link when I was looking for inspiration. Someday if we build, I want a wood set up like that...but for now I love our plastic! :giggle

It is in our laundry room, so it's been AWESOME to fold clothes straight out of the dryer and put them away right away!!

[Dovenoir]

I put up 2 huge dowel rods to hang clothes in the basement. But too uneven for dressers down there. Only wearing clothes for the week come upstairs.
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[blondie]

We have a big hanging bar, too. AND I still have an upstairs closet. :shifty We have TONS of clothes. :bag

[StewardofLOs]

I have this, sort of. All of our clothes and the sheets are in the master bedroom, and all of us sleep in the boy's room (theoretically). I just have a bunch of random dressers and stuff, so the room is ringed with dressers along each wall. The closet in the room has all our hanging clothes. I only hang up our dress clothes, so we don't need a ton of space for that. And the shoes are on shelves in the bottom of the closet. It's pretty low-key, actually. I didn't buy anything special to set it up. I do love that room, though...

That's pretty much what we do. :yes


I'm excited that you're excited blondie :) You are reminding me of how excited DH and I were when we originally set it up. When I came up with this idea, and then talked DH into it, we felt so weird. But then again, what else is new? :giggle We already cosleep on two mattresses on the floor, and we are newly couchless....but we are more interested in designing our living space to fit OUR needs, not the expectations of "traditional" society :rolleyes It just makes *so much sense*, ya know?

[Blue-EyedLady]

My only concern is when we're trying to sell the house. We'll somehow need to convert back to a more "traditional" looking arrangement.

[Chaos Coordinator]

:raisehand


Ours is in our laundry room. I have two chests of drawers, double stack rods opposite the w&d and a rod over it that currently holds hangers but could hold baby clothes. Then we have a deep freeze in the corner and as many shelves as I could feasibly line the space with. We keep our emergency kit supplies up there but I also hide Christmas gifts up there and occasionally other things like the drill or whatever.

We also have a coat/shoe closet in the hall, a linen closet, and then our master bedroom closet has art supplies, fabric and yarn stash, photos, important papers, etc. my 4 yr olds bedroom closet is off season clothes, and my 1 yr olds bedroom closet has board games, puzzles, and toy sets (train set, magnet blocks, bin of duplos, etc)

[blondie]

My best friend was horrified. :roll "No dressers? What will you put in your room ?" "Well, hopefully more small people" :haha


My parents are going to wig out. :rolleyes Mom will have 98045 reasons why this is stupid and dad will be upset that I'm not keeping his great grandma's bedroom set in tact. He's got first dibs on the dressers. :shrug The bed is broken, he wouldn't want it anyways. :shifty That's my next goal - a new bed.

[Tandem mama]

I would love to have the space to do this!

[MomtoJGJ]

I would love to have the space to do this!

This is the only reason we don't.

The kids clothes are all in the laundry room... well, not Penelope's, but that's simply because she's growing so fast right now. Her clothes are all in a sterilite container which is acting as a bedrail keeping her in her bed ;)

Whenever we move, if ever, I'm specifically looking for a laundry ROOM. Not a mud room with washer and dryer, not a laundry closet, but a laundry ROOM so we can do this. I've had this planned out for several years now ;)

I need our next house to have about 6 bedrooms to do all the stuff I want to have done :shifty

[BearyBlessed]

We have a "changing room". It started as the "baby room" when Aji was born. I knew he wouldn't be sleeping in it, but I wanted a place to decorate (:shifty) and to store all the baby stuff. So, his clothes, changing table, diapers, and all the outgrown stuff and yet to be worn stuff was stashed in there.
Before long, I had all my clothes in there, too. And of course, YoYo's too. DH is the only one who doesn't use that room. I love it! But, it's probably gonna have to be re-purposed before long. :pout

In my ideal house, we'd have the laundry room near the bedroom and it would be big enough to be the family closet. :yes I might be able to squeeze it in our current one, but it would be very tight. And it's just not a very nice space.
We already have/had some unconventional choices in room set-up, so it would fit right in! :giggle


O/T- Christina, how does the "couchless" thing work? Do you like it?

[Autumn]

Our big family closet and the closet with the washer and dryer are both in our bedroom - it's really nice

[Glitterfish]

I wonder if I could do this, at least w/ the kids clothes? :think

Our mudroom (where the washer and dryer are) is pretty big, and it has cabinets already.

Iiiiinteresting :think

[Chaos Coordinator]

Ours is big for a laundry room but its not a big room per se. It's about 9.5" square.

[staceylayne]

We have a small laundry room near the master downstairs. Kids rooms are upstairs (why didn't someone council me that I'd want my children closer when we built six years ago? :sigh). A while ago I realized my kids were basically living off the clothes in the laundry room. Kids clothes got washed, folded or hung and never put away b/c it was so much easier to grab something from in there than trek upstairs to get an outfit or pie of socks. So I started brainstorming about a way to fit enough hanging bars and bins in the laundry room to accommodate all the kids' stuff.

Suddenly I realized: what about MY closet?? :doh My closet (also DH's) is stupid big. We laughed so much about it when we moved in. We aren't big clothes people, but even if we were, it would easily fit all our clothes and then some. It could nearly be another bedroom. It's silly.

So, I just did a little rearranging, bought a little set of drawers and, ta-da! Family closet. It isn't magazine worthy, but I LOVE it. Seriously, love, love, love. :heart

A few pics:

This is looking in the door. On the right there are four bars for DH's clothes, with some built in shelves in the middle.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g282/parkers0426/95E916B4-A20E-4E65-AC10-87771F8475BF-844-000001C07045E7EE_zps22a239c2.jpg

Kids stuff and extra bags. Top left for C. Bottom left for D. Bottom right for B.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g282/parkers0426/3EF21548-DD68-4504-8F88-ADB1B61ED379-844-000001C079AC1568_zpsfe356874.jpg

My clothes. Small three drawer unit holds kids socks, underwear and pjs. Everything else of theirs is hanging because we have way more hanging space than drawer space. The black dresser holds socks, underwear, tshirts, shorts and lounge clothes for me and DH.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g282/parkers0426/C001462A-F44C-4735-A4E5-899F4C5DD59E-844-000001C080C8ADC8_zpsf6ea4ad3.jpg

[Glitterfish]

This (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZVZuguxC4o) is a video I posted in the housekeeping video thread awhile back.... the first room I show is my mudroom (messy as it is). It's much neater/less cluttered now, and I'm wondering how I could somehow make a family closet out of it (while keeping in mind that this is the first room everyone sees in my house, I am not a neat freak, and I will most likely not keep it clutter free :bag)

[illinoismommy]

I'd love to do this, but my washer dryer is in the garage, not a nice big garage, a tiny squeeze around the car garage >_>

[StewardofLOs]

staceylayne, I'm drooling over all of that space to hang clothes! OTOH, we seem to have this aversion to actually putting clothes on hangers, so they would just end up in a big pile on the floor :bag :)




O/T- Christina, how does the "couchless" thing work? Do you like it?We love it so far, though I know it's not for everyone. :shrug
The though process went like this--

~We had a very old, falling apart, might-have-mold-spores-in-it-from-the-old-house couch that we wanted to get rid of. :yuck

~We didn't have any money to replace it, and the kids would tear up whatever we bought anyway. :rolleyes

~We have less than 750 sq. ft. of living space, so we are always looking for ways to make more room and to make the most of what space we do have.

~The kids LOVE the bean bags at my parents' house.

~The only people who come over are our parents, and they always sit in chairs anyway because they don't like sinking into the couch. (The dining room table chairs, though we don't have a dining room--the table is just in a corner of our living room.)

So over my Spring Break we ditched the couch (the house already feels cleaner :rockon) and replaced it with four bean bags, each in a different color. We have a twin sized mattress about half the thickness of a normal mattress that came with my daybed back when I was in high school. That mattress stays in the bedroom during the day, and it comes out at night to be lounged on and/or used for DD and I to lay on while she nurses. The bean bags can also be put in the bedroom during the day or pretty much anywhere the kids want to move them (they are really lightweight). Now we have a ton of floor space and a more flexible living space!

[NeshamaMama]

LOVE that, staceylayne!!

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[zak]

We have had variations of this.

We kept the kids stuff in similar three tier bins as dressers IN my closet for years.

Then we began to multiply. :shfity So the older boys have their bins in a closet upstairs. The two littles have dressers by our dresser in our room.


It's more spread out, but there isn't room in our house to have it all in one place anymore. It worked while it worked tho! :) We have a very small laundry room. ;)

[Lady Grey]

We don't have any walk in closets or a laundry room, so I can't fully implement a family closet. I do have an idea of housing the three younger kids' clothes in one closet and using the other just for storage bins. I think this would be a more efficient use of space. We will see if I get the urge to try it in the next few weeks ;-)

[BearyBlessed]

Thanks for sharing, Christina. That sounds cool! :rockon

[backtobasicsmum]

I mentioned this elsewhere, but if you have your closet in your laundry room....doesn't your stuff get dusty? I find my laundry room gets so, so dusty. We've got quite a bit of shelving in there currently for canned goods/cleaning supplies and they are thick with dust so quickly. I couldn't store clothes there, as they'd get awful looking in no time at all! :scratch

[blondie]

We don't have dust in ours. That's weird to me that you do.

DH has had his clothes down there since we moved in here years ago. I've never let him in my closet. :haha

[Chaos Coordinator]

Yeah mine doesn't get dusty either :shrug

[backtobasicsmum]

I feel like I should make a poll or something...who has dusty laundry rooms? :giggle

[Chaos Coordinator]

Do it! Do it!

[blondie]

We have a lot of clothes, and I don't know what to do about it. :shifty


Derailing my own thread a little.

[Chaos Coordinator]

Our situation was mostly remedied by tossing almost everything with exposed elastic or spandex in the fabric. I also had to get rid of everything with a stain. :shiver. And then I keep our jackets and swim suits in the hall coat closet, and all our off-season stuff in Hollis' bedroom closet (along with my prom dress and my wedding dress :giggle). So I switched that out in spring and fall.


Right now I feel like we don't have enough clothing. My stuff keeps getting attacked by carpet beetles, and we have so little that it gets washed too frequently and gets worn thin from that process. I'm tryin to bulk it up with higher quality items but I can't afford much so it's like one nice piece for every 3-4 thrift or Walmart pieces.

[Dovenoir]

Dusty laundry room makes me think your dryer vent is clogged.
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[DaraSKS]

I've never heard of a "family closet" before. Interesting. We do keep all of the guys' socks in the laundry room. Does that count? :D (no one likes matching the socks and so the easiest way is to leave everyone's socks in one place.)

[MomtoJGJ]

Our laundry room doesn't get dusty either. We did at one point get a crimp in the dryer vent hose thingy and got lots of little linty dust on the top of the washer and dryer... so I'd say check that.

[Blue-EyedLady]

Now you all have got me thinking about how we could take do our family closet better and possibly increase the storage space in the house... :think

[Scox2003]

Wow! That sounds cool! I've never heard of a family closet before.

[blondie]

I'm hoping to be totally moved into our system tonight or tomorrow. More like tomorrow, because I'm comfy on the couch right now. :haha

I'm going to kinda miss having dressers. :shifty Where will I stack stuff ?!

[Blue-EyedLady]

I went to IKEA today and drooled over a bunch of stuff...