The Original Plan

These past couple of days I have been helping my friend Sarah re-organize her home.  Her husband has been out of town on work related business so she was hoping to get a few things done and surprise him when he got back.

We decided to have a brainstorming night at her house last week so she could show me what areas she wanted to work on. Then, she was going to go shopping to pick up the supplies we needed so we could start the fun Sunday after church.

The original plan was to tackle numerous areas.  They were:
-The pantry
-The hall closet
-The cabinetry in the kitchen
-The closet in bedroom number two
-The closet in bedroom number three, and
-The dinning room

We honestly thought we could get all of this done in one day.  Looking back on it now I know that was a silly notion to have.  We were ambitious and eager to get started and (in my mind at least) there wasn't too much that could go wrong.

Boy was I naive.

And stupid.

Let's start at the beginning though.  It'll be much easier to understand the goals we had if we start from there.

Sarah has a small pantry.  It's not very tall (maybe around 5 feet?) but it is only a few feet wide and the shelves are extremely deep.  The biggest problem was that she had no idea what items she needed from the grocery store and she would buy a lot of duplicates.  There would also be a lot of items that would go bad because they would get put in the very back of the pantry and were later forgotten.  We ended up deciding to clear everything out of that pantry and build a new one in the hall closet.  It would be a space for food and cleaning items, so an L-shaped pantry seemed the best way to go.

The picture below was my inspiration, but Sarah took it a few steps further and decided to use a track system.  She figured that would give her the freedom to add more shelves (or take some away) as time went on.  Plus, she has used the track system before and loves it!  We bought this one from Lowes.

Picture from
Home Stories A 2 Z

The second step was to make sure we had a space to organize her cleaning supplies.  We decided on the L-shaped pantry because that would free up one wall to hang up her brooms, mops, and whatever else she wanted on the opposite wall (see picture below).  You could also hang it on the door, which was the other option we considered.  

Picture from Real Simple

After figuring out what we were going to do downstairs we moved to the upstairs bedrooms.  Sarah has a lot of wrapping paper, gift bags, bows, etc.  And boy do I mean a lot!  She found a great solution from The Container Store that was able to hold all that she had and more!  The picture below was our inspiration.

Original image from IHeart Organizing

Elfa organizing systems are not cheap (even when they're on sale) but you can literally use them for anything!  They are especially great if you need more room for your pantry.  Plus, there are no screws so you can easily move it from one room to another which makes it a great solution for a small apartment! 

(I'm trying to talk Chris into letting me buy one while it's on sale.  I think I may be making a bit of progress!) 

Stay tuned to see what happens once we start putting things together!  

I'll leave you with this:

There was laughter, excitement, frustration, and almost tears.  Interested?  You'll have to come back to find out more!