Linen Closet Organized

Seriously, what is it about linen closets that make them junk magnets?? Maybe it's the fact that they are meant to hold sheets, and folding fitted sheets is horrible, and so it makes you give up on the whole closet?? who knows!
But I'm so excited to show you our newly organized linen closet, folded fitted sheets and all :)

If you missed our Linen Closet Progress post, here's what the closet looked like before:

And here's what it looks like after:

We painted the closet walls "Geyser" by Martha Stewart. I wanted something a bit darker and more dramatic. I love the way it looks with the wall color and the trim color. Painting the insides of closets is my favorite thing to do. It's such a surprise every time you open the door.

Lee installed solid shelves, I just like solid shelving better! We have wire shelving in our front hall closet and it works really well for shoes and dirty soles. But everything that's going into the linen closet is clean, so we had the option to choose more attractive shelving.
We ran wood around the perimeter of the closet, then cut the shelves to fit and screwed them into place.

We absolutely needed to make room for the vacuum. As much as I wanted to have pretty shelves with beautifully folded sheets and towels, filling the whole closet, we HAD to fit in the vacuum (function wins over beauty every time here) and lost a lot of space but we had no choice. We were able to squeak out  a bit more storage, Lee installed two small shelves just big enough to hold to baskets from Ikea. In the top basket is where I keep the "Fall/Winter" touches for around the house, the lamb skin throws and fuzzy blanket. And the bottom basket is where I keep all of the throw pillow covers, we have summer ones and winter ones and fall ones and since I started sewing we've had A LOT more :)

Under the baskets is Max's Crate, I was going to take it out for the picture but this is reality blogging and in reality we have to store his crate somewhere. Lee made sure to leave just enough space for the crate and the vacuum attachments.

I had a friend over the yesterday for coffee and she wanted to get "the inside scoop" on today's post, so I took her upstairs and showed her the linen closet and her reaction was "where are all your sheets?" So I thought you might be wondering the same. We only have 2 sets of bed sheets for our bed, our white organic sheets, and a set of organic flannel sheets for the winter (p.s. organic flannel is expensive, next time I might just opt for regular flannel :). I don't think we need anymore than that. Once a week I wash the sheets, then put them right back on (well, I really wait for Lee to get home so he can put the fitted sheet on for me :). We all have sheet sets in our linen closet sitting there getting musty, I like things simple and to me simple is 2 sets of sheets :) But I wouldn't go fewer than 2 sets in case of emergency, we've had to spend a hot summer night on flannel sheets before because Max thought grass was his main course for the night!

So there's our super duper newly organized linen closet.

*If you look at the top of the linen closet, there's a space for future quilts this amateur quilter (me) will be quilting :) Always Plan Ahead!! haha