Linen Closet: A Bargain Find

As luck would have it, I hit up a couple of great neighborhood yard sales over the past few weeks. Neighborhood yard sales are my favorite and almost every neighborhood in Arlington holds one each year including ours. I love that people who would not normally hold yard sales decide to throw some stuff on the lawn - usually that's the best stuff with great prices!

Back to the story... you may remember that a few weeks ago I reorganized our kitchen storage closet with some Elfa door organizers, making it a better use of space for our family.

They were a bit pricey but ultimately worth it for a closet we use daily.  Wouldn't you know I stumbled on another Elfa door organizer in a yard sale. It didn't have a price so tried to play it cool and act like I really didn't know what it was. The guy selling it explained how it worked and then the price... $10!  I basically threw money at him and ran down the street with it.  It sat in my basement for a few weeks while I pondered the possibilities. I thought about our master bathroom linen closet but I like to keep our bathrobes there.  The next best possibility was one of our two hall linen closets which are original to our house.  I guess I never photographed these before but I probably should at some point!  I still think it's amazing that in a house where the original bedroom closets could barely hold hangers, would have not one but two decent linen closets!  Priorities were clearly different in 1940.
It took Handy Hubby about 3 minutes to take down our large ironing board (which we almost never use since installing our beloved built-in ironing board), and install the new organizer.

It's certainly not a magazine worthy transformation but it is certainly better than what it was before. All of that stuff on the door was thrown on two shelves and the floor of the closet.

It was probably originally used in a pantry for spices and oils because the baskets are skinnier but there are about 8 of them so it doesn't bother me!

Now we have a bunch of extra closet space.  I even cleaned up the stuff on the floor which is now completely empty.  In the long term, we may put a plastic hamper in here for bathroom towels. Our kids use our bathroom most of the time now so their towels generally end up in there.  

I even found a bag of brand new beach towels which I had completely forgotten about!  We go through  a lot of beach towels between pool trips and school water days twice a week for both kids.  We love poncho towels for the kids which make it so much easier for them to walk without tripping on their towels.
Now I just need to do some hard core reorganizing in this closet and it's companion which holds all of our every day guest bath towels and sheets for the kids beds and the den (which still lacks an actual bed!).

For other posts about my closets, click here. For other organization posts, click here.  

Linking to: Southern Hospitality