How to Organize a Craft Closet

A huge thanks to IKEA for sponsoring and providing product for this post! My favorable opinion of amazing organization products is 100% my own. 🙂 For more information, see my disclosures here.

I have to confess, sometimes we bloggers can be a little sneaky. Our rooms may look all neat and tidy, but sometimes the camera may not show everything that’s going on in a space.

Take my fabulously feminine home office, for example. It is for sure one of my favorite rooms in our house, and I’ve shown many photos of it on the blog. I’ve shared shots like this one of my pretty bookshelves and pegboard…

And this one of my little desk and chair…

But there is one shot of my office that I’ve never shared on the blog before. On purpose. Because it is a huge mess and they would probably fire me from blogging if they knew it existed. I’ve never- before today- posted a photo of my office closet. Prepare yourselves, friends. It is not pretty.

Eeeek! Kind of scary, right?! This closet has always been a hodge podge of whatever leftover storage pieces I could find around the house: a sinking plastic drawer set, a rickety tower that we used to use in our laundry room, diaper boxes as storage bins… and I haven’t had a kid in diapers in almost two years, so that tells you how long it has been like this!

This closet was in desperate need of an overhaul, and since the new year is the perfect time to tackle all of those organizational projects I’ve been putting off forever, I decided it was finally time.

This transformation was actually easier than I expected to be, and with a little help from Donnie, we pulled it off in just a few hours. Here’s how we did it:

1. Remove the old closet pieces.

The single metal shelf and rod weren’t doing us much good, so Donnie tore them out to make room for something more efficient.

For some reason the builders of our townhouse decided to use closet doors that go all the way to the ceiling. Unfortunately, they aren’t engineered very well and break easily, so we have slowly been building headers on all of the closets in the house and replacing the floor-to-ceiling doors with ones that are standard size. We got rid of the one remaining door that was left on this closet and will eventually add a header and new doors here as well. {Add that to Donnie’s “honey-do list”! 😉 }

2. Remove everything from closet and touch up paint.

I always like to start with a blank slate! When I take everything out of the space, that means I can be really intentional about what goes back in. If I don’t absolutely need it and use it often, it gets thrown away or donated. Of course (in the interest of full transparency) to get my blank slate in the closet, the rest of my office had to look like this for a little while…

Yikes! Don’t worry! It didn’t stay like that for long! I went on a purging spree and got rid of a ton of stuff I hadn’t used in years, which felt amazing!!

3. Install functional, beautiful, yet still wallet-friendly closet system!

Y’all, this is the third time we’ve used the ALGOT closet system from IKEA (now called BOAXEL) to organize a space, and I can’t help but go back to it again and again! (We also used it to organize our main closet and our pantry space.)

I always knew that I loved it because it was inexpensive {and, let’s be honest, I’m pretty much the cheapest thriftiest person alive!} yet was still incredibly sturdy and easy to install, plus it was oh-so-functional; we could choose the exact pieces that would work to fit our needs. But THEN I learned about the IKEA concept called Democratic Design, and it all made even more sense- they do it on purpose!

You see, every product made by IKEA has to meet their high standards in 5 areas- form, function, price, quality, and sustainability. I almost laughed out loud when Donnie was installing the ALGOT system in my closet and he said, “You will never find any closet system that is a better price, easier to put together, looks as good and is as high quality as this one” because without even knowing it, he totally summed the Democratic Design concept. It’s that easy to see in their products.

When it comes to the design of the ALGOT system, IKEA designer Francis Coyette said,

I wanted to make a simple, discrete storage series that could be used in many different ways and for many different things. The challenge was to minimise the amount of material we used but provide maximum strength so that ALGOT could cover all the different storage needs in a home and still be affordable.

I would say he certainly succeeded; so many of those reasons are why we keep coming back to the ALGOT system again and again!

Need more details about how to measure for an IKEA ALGOT closet system? See this post.

4. Put everything back together in an organized way.

After I had purged out all of the items I no longer needed, I had to find a way to organize the things I had left. I ended up using three different sizes of FJALLA boxes as well as a few clear SAMLA boxes to hold some heavier items. Take a look at how it all came together…

So much better! As you may have noticed, there was one more thing I had to do after I had all of the pieces in the bins…

5. Label EVERYTHING!

I love to label! To me, it’s an essential step of organization because it makes it so much easier to see what goes where. I printed small labels on card stock to fit in the label spots provided on the FJALLA boxes:

Since the larger FJALLA boxes were turned sideways to fit on the shelves, I used my Silhouette machine to cut vinyl labels for them as well so they were easy to see.

The SAMLA boxes got vinyl labels too.

I also took an inventory of what was in each bin…

…and attached a list to the inside of the lid so I could quickly and easily see what each box held.

And after everything was organized and labeled, I had the neat and tidy craft closet of my dreams! 🙂

One final item that I added to the space was a few STOTTA lights. They clip right onto the ALGOT shelves and I can easily tap them to get a little extra light when I’m looking through boxes or putting things away.

Want to see the “before and after”? My favorite part!

I used to dread searching for things in this closet, and now everything is easy to find when I need it. Oh, and it looks prettier too!

Just in case you are looking to organize a craft closet of your own (or any closet for that matter!), here’s what I used to complete this transformation {Note: Materials needed will vary based on the size of your closet.}:

3 ALGOT Wall Uprights

5 31.5″ x 15″ ALGOT Shelves

3 23 5/8″ x 15″ ALGOT Shelves

13 ALGOT Wall Brackets

1 ALGOT Clothes Rail

[FYI… IKEA recently discontinued their ALGOT system and replaced it with BOAXEL, which is very similar.]

2 SAMLA Boxes with Lids

4 Large FJALLA Boxes

3 Medium FJALLA Boxes

3 Small FJALLA Boxes

1 TJENA Box

3 STOTTA LED Spotlights

[Psssttt… Organize every room of your house with our 100 best home organization tips!]

Thank you so much for stopping by to check out our closet transformation today, friends!! Happy organizing!

A huge thanks to IKEA for sponsoring and providing product for this post! My favorable opinion of amazing organization products is 100% my own. 🙂 For more information, see my disclosures here.

IKEA is a registered trademark of Inter IKEA Systems B.V. and is used with permission. The views, ideas and opinions expressed here are my own.