Organizing our tiny storage room

I'm kicking off the year with a little purging and organizing. 

I introduced you to my favorite room in the house a couple years ago. It’s not what you would expect as a favorite, since half of it has cement walls:

That’s how it looked years back before everything was drywalled in. Considering I used to have all of this down there:

Getting down to this little 60-square-foot room was pretty fantastic.

It’s actually stayed fairly organized for the past couple of years. I think it was around when we started construction on taking down the wall in the family room that it became a complete and utter disaster area:

I show you this because I love you. Be kind.

This room serves a couple functions for us now – one is storage and one is the “cat” room. A couple of the litter boxes are in here. One is upstairs as well and that’s the only one they like to use but that’s a longer story.

I actually got all this done before Christmas. I was fed up with the space and a woman on a mission. The first thing I did was to take every single thing that was on the floor or stacked up on something out of the room:

We keep our dehumidifier down hooked up to the sump pump but we turned it off some time ago because the sound of it was terrifying one of the cats. He’s heard it for literally years and all of the sudden…terrifying. So.

Also, we don’t use it in the winter anyway and we’ve been told a couple times it’s really not that necessary in our dry basement. So it went to the under the stairs storage for now and that opened up quite a bit of room.

The biggest problem has been the paint. I haven’t gone through it in years and I didn’t have a great system set up. All of this was sitting on the floor in the room:

Most of those were on the floor because I had already decided to get rid of them. I just was too lazy to take them all upstairs? I guess? Who knows.

Even when it was fairly organized I would get frustrated finding a color I needed. So I grabbed some mailing labels we had:

And used them to label those that weren’t:

I put the room I used them in and how I used them too – ceiling paint, trim paint, whatever. What was funny is that for some of the colors I had to search my own blog to figure out how I used it. ;)

The paint area was a mess mostly because I just didn’t have enough room for everything. I had all the little sample and quart cans stacked with the bigger ones and it was a mess.

I had a few more of the metal brackets (super cheap) and grabbed the best piece of scrap wood I had from the basement. It was only a one by six (all the other shelves are at least one by ten) but it was just big enough to hold all the small cans:

And obviously I got rid of a ton of stuff. I saw this years ago and try to keep it in mind when clearing out: It’s not a 100 percent for me, but pretty good advice. This goes for your closet too! What to do with the stuff is another question – I do a mix of all of those things usually. It’s been awhile since I hosted a swap, I may have to do that again soon. :)

I’ve said it a million times but I’ll say it again…you waste money when you aren’t organized. I’ll be the first to admit that when my storage spaces become a mess I end up buying something again because I can’t find it. It’s such a waste and must be the reason I have approximately 12 tape measures.

As for the stuff still in the room – a lot of it is for future projects, a lot of it is just decorative stuff I actually use:

The awesome part? I have empty space on nearly every shelf. Hopefully by the end of this no-spend month I’ll have more projects done and even more space!

One of my favorite tricks is to use the drapery tie backs as big hooks. I use them in our coat closet for bags and scarves and they work GREAT! I used to use these on every one of our windows but have since taken them all down – so I have a lot that I use this way:

And yes, I have a little lamp in here. Every room needs some low light. HA!

There you go – one space completely purged and organized! It feels so good!! I’ve moved on to other spaces and will share those as well. Are you feeling the decluttering bug right now? My goodness, when I have the time and patience to focus on it I love this process!