What Mom Really Wants: a place for everything

The Pottery Barn Daily System fit perfectly into the IKEA cabinet shell. I love the mail slots up top. More surface space, but out of the way.

It has been dusty around our house lately.  As we finish various projects on our house (drainage, tile floors in the bathroom, trim, trim and endless trim) I can say that many of these dusty projects have been laborious and pretty dull (like buying a new mattress or putting on a $15k roof), but one project that has been fun and rewarding is our a hall closet turned catch-all landing station.  Our 1980’s original house was full of flimsy louvered doors.  This closet used to have dark louvered doors that popped off the track when you opened them.  Now, this closet is uber functional for our family.  We utilized the same IKEA cabinetry we installed in our kitchen to fill in this under utlized closet.  The space now has large storage drawers and doors and a central open station that houses our charging station, phone, home/school files, keys, bills, and whatever needs a place to land when we walk in the door.  As a result, my kitchen counters are spared the piles.  What more could a girl ask for?

This closet space is central to our kitchen and entry way, a great spot for the important stuff.

IKEA Kitchen Components Used:

• One APPLAD 36 inch wide 4 Drawer Base Cabinet – white
• One 36 inch Base Cabinet Shell – white
• One APPLAD Refrigerator Wall Cabinet 36 wide X 15 ¼ tall X 24 deep
• One 36 inch wide shelf
• Pulls as desired

The big drawers are great for the cans that don’t fit in my pantry and I store snacks like granola bars in here too, so the kids can grab them as they head out the door in the morning.

I knew I didn’t want the entire closet open – it would look too sloppy. Behind the doors up top we store files we don’t use daily, but surely want on hand: school directories, take-out menus, etc.

HOW TO:

We utilized IKEA kitchen cabinetry to transform a standard 36 X 72 hall closet into a modern landing station/storage center. This was a very under-utilized space in our home.   Being adjacent to our front door and kitchen, we felt like this was the ideal storage spot for so many “every-day items.”

• First, we removed our old louvered doors from our hall closet.  Working from the bottom up, we installed the four drawer cabinet, then the shell of a 36 inch base cabinet (center) and then refrigerator cabinet slid onto the top.
• The cabinets and base cabinets fit pretty perfectly into our closet, (there may be some dead space behind the 24 inch deep cabinets – depending on your closet depth).  We needed to add some shims in spots, but trimmed up, it looks clean and finished.
• To make the mail slots, we used a standard 36 inch wide shelf and trimmed it down to half the depth, then used scrap pieces to make the vertical dividers.
• The Pottery Barn Daily System pieces fit perfectly into the open central section to finish it off and provide that much desired “place for everything.”

If it doesn’t have a place it goes in the recycling. The endless fight against clutter! Go ahead Peter Walsh, stop by.