Closet organizing at Grammy's house

Last weekend, and the weekend 2 weeks before that, was spent at my mother-in-law's house outside of Spokane. She lives on a lake, so we had a lot of fun playing on the beach, walking the boardwalk along the lake, and playing in the water. Little M had fun with her Grammy, and I had fun organizing the closet in Grammy's spare room! It was basically a win-win-win-win situation. I knew Little M was being well taken care of & loved on (and spoiled!) by Grammy (and G-daddy as her husband likes to be called!), I got a good break from her while being able to do one of my favorite things - organize, and Grammy of course got quality time with her granddaughter!

So back to the closet. Grammy's house is a two level home with a two bedroom main floor with an open floor plan living space & kitchen, and a walkout basement that is rented out as an apartment right now, so her space is limited to the upstairs. When her husband retires (he still lives over on the west side in the home my husband grew up) and moves over to live there too, the renter will go and they will do some renovating to have full use of the downstairs as well. For now though, her space is a bit tight for all of the stuff she has.

You see, she buys things at yard sales or thrift stores for cheap, and then sells them on eBay. She does really well since she is great at spotting salable items! Last year she started buying Halloween costumes when she saw good quality ones for cheap throughout the year, and then she sold them online before Halloween. She quickly realized it was well worth buying them up and storing them. But that meant she had even more things to store around her house, and this year the bins of costumes were taking over!

So that is how I came to be organizing her closet. The spare bedroom has a nice sized closet, but it was full (literally) to the brim with quilting supplies in boxes and bins and bags. It was quite a mess, and as Grammy had just retired and is now hoping to do more quilting, we thought having the quilting fabrics more accessible and less of a mess would help her be better able to relax and quilt! So we decided that the quilting supplies would be moved out of the closet, likely to end up in a storage system like an Ikea Expedit bookshelf system, or something similar.

I realized that I forgot to take a true before picture of all the quilting supplies in the closet, and of the bins and bins of costumes (bad blogger!). But here is the stack of quilting supplies after we took almost everything out of the closet (and when I remembered to take a photo), and below that is what was still in the closet when I remembered. That tower with drawers below was in the closet too. Yup, that closet was literally packed full!

That left the closet empty to fill with all those Halloween costumes! Although Grammy claims that she really doesn't need to easily see the stuff she sells online, since once she brings it home she takes a photo of it to list it with, and then until it sells she just needs it stored someplace, I thought that by having the costumes sorted she wouldn't have to dig through multiple bins to find the specific one she was looking to package up and mail out. So that led us to design a closet with multiple levels of rods for hanging costumes, along with some shelves for storing those miscellaneous costume accessories like wigs, witch hats, and crowns.

We ended up picking up a system at Home Depot that she can rearrange if in the future she stops selling Halloween costumes and decides she wants something else in that closet. It was fairly easy to install and now can be adjusted in minutes if she decides she wants a rod higher or lower, or wants to add a shelf. Here is the closet all empty and waiting to be filled with costumes!

And here it is again once we packed all those costumes in there! Great, right?! I think Grammy was pleased that we did all this organizing, and hopefully she lets me come back and visit again :)