Toddler Closet Organization

Like many of you, I sometimes have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest. I love the inspiration and the good ideas that can come from it, but sometimes it makes me jealous of all of the gorgeous, well-organized homes that are out there. I pinned a few really nice children's closets to my pinboard, and I'll admit that I was feeling some closet envy. I wanted to come up with a cute way to keep Johana's closet organized, but didn't have money to buy cute containers or extravagant shelving systems. One thing that we seem to have an excess of is cardboard boxes. Between shopping at Costco and ordering things from Amazon I feel like I am always breaking down boxes for the recycle bin. There have been a few tutorials popping up here and there for covering diaper boxes in fabric to make them more attractive, which I considered, but I still didn't want to spend the money it would take to buy the fabric.

My more frugal solution was to cover the boxes in paper. Around Christmas, I bought a roll of shiny white newsprint from a local newspaper office. I paid $5 for it, and I don't know how much was on it, but it was enough to wrap all of my Christmas presents and to cover 8 boxes and counting. I just measured the sides of the boxes, used my rotary cutter and cutting mat to cut rectangles that were 2 inches wider and longer than the box sides, and glued them on with spray adhesive. I pretty much wrapped them like a present, except that I used separate pieces of paper instead of just one.

To add some visual interest, I used scrapbook paper so cover the sides leaving a few inches of the white showing at the top. I bought a pack of patterned paper with a 40% off coupon, and since it was 12x12 sheets, I cut it into 6 inch strips. I used the same spray adhesive to attach the scrapbook paper, and on some of the long sides had to piece it together. You can only tell if you look really closely though. I was out of Modge Podge when I made all of these boxes, but I think that I will go over the scrapbook paper with Modge Podge to make it a little bit more durable.

To get more vertical storage, I wanted to do shelves. I considered doing something built-in, but since the plan is to eventually move baby sister in here someday and our storage needs may change, I opted to use the $15 Wal-Mart bookshelves instead. The blue baskets came from Dollar Tree and help to keep the smaller toys somewhat sorted. Cleaning up with a two-year old is easier when you can just throw everything in a basket, hence the stacking crates. Most of her toys are just thrown in there to make clean up easier.

I added some labels so that I actually knew what was in the boxes, and there you have my closet makeover. I like it enough that I will probably do something similar in the closet in my nursery next week.

-Mandi

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