More About the Family Closet
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In the comments on my recent Finding a Laundry System That Works vlog, several people mentioned that they’d like to hear more about our family closet. Because ours is literally tucked into a small corner of the laundry room, I haven’t been able to get a good picture of it, so I decided just to sketch it out for you. Art was never my strong point, though, so please forgive the crudeness of my sketch!
Basically, we have a small cubby tucked into the corner of our shelving, with the washer and dryer on the right and the counter directly in front of it. The opening is less than two feet wide because I wanted my counter to be as long as possible.
In the corner, we mounted two closet bars — one for sweaters and dresses and the other to hold two hanging organizers.
On the top shelves of the organizers, I have four baskets that hold the girls socks, underwear, baby legs, etc.
Each row below that is assigned to one of our daughters, with their t-shirts and pajamas on the left and their pants and shirts on the right.
Obviously, this limits the amount of space we have for clothes which helps me limit the amount of clothing we buy, since shoving the shelves full just makes it harder to get what we need each day.
As you can see from the sketch, the space we have set aside for a family closet is really not very much at all. The baby’s clothes are currently in a wardrobe in the nursery, but when she’s a little bit older, I’ll move her clothes into the laundry room as well, since we have an empty row in our current system. At that point, we will have all four girls’ clothes organized and put away in what amounts to a very small closet.
My husband and I still keep our clothes in our room, but since it’s on the main level, I haven’t had the same struggle of putting them away as I did when they were on a different level.
If you have more space or are looking for other options for a family closet, here are some other posts I found from around the blogosphere (it just so happens that these are from large families, but I would do the same thing if I only had 1 or 2 kids now that I know what a big difference it makes!):
Family Closet Pictorial, Lots of Kids.com
A New Family Closet, True Moments of Family
No More Laundry Blues (with a description and pictures of the Duggar’s family closet), Musings from the Heart
Have you thought about setting up a family closet? What appeals to you about this system? What downsides do you see?
I like the idea of the family closet, especially for larger families. Our master is downstairs as well as the washer and dryer. The kid’s rooms are all upstairs. It would be nice to not have to take the clothes upstairs. However my kids put away their clothes so it hasn’t been a big issue. I have just enough space where I can have a small laundry basket for each child. I also have hanging space. When the laundry is one they take their baskets to their rooms.
I find with my daughter being only 3 the clothes she wears the most end up staying in the laundry room and I choose from there. Her dressier clothes are in her closet. As soon as she can handle putting her clothes in the drawers on her own she will have to put them away too.
I only have to put away our clothes downstairs so having the kids put away their laundry really helps!
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I love the idea of a family closet. We don’t have a good set-up for it at the moment though, with an outdoor laundry (common in older houses in Australia), and only 3 bedrooms in our house. As our children are only 14 months apart, we have a lot of their clothes together and we only have one change table and nappy change area. This is all in our nursery though. It can be a bit annoying if our baby is sleeping and our 18 month old needs a nappy change or change of clothes, but that is all we can do at the moment… I would love a separate room like on some of those links you posted!
Do you have a separate nappy change area, or is that in the laundry too?
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I’m tempted to build a laundry room upstairs when we put our addition on so that I don’t have to go to the basement to do the laundry. Out of sight, out of mind = never a good recipe for success.
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I have never seen a family closet before. It is really a great idea. I don’t have a closet to use currently, but I will file it away in the memory banks for later. We are adding a nook/closet in the children’s room currently and I will use some ideas to design that. Thank you for writing about this.
I only have 2 children so they each have their own dresser and I labeled each drawer with a picture and words so they can find and put away their own clothes. It would be nice to use that floor space for something else though and use the closet to host most of their clothing and off season things as well.
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I wish I had the room for this in my house. That would solve a lot of our problems with laundry! In my next house I want a bigger laundry room and now I want room for a makeshift closet in there too!
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