In this post I am going to show you how to get an organized linen closet and find your linen quickly. Read on to learn my top linen closet organization tips!
My linen closet cabinet has always been a big mess. I have let it go this way for so long that I kind of got used to it, thinking there would never be a solution for this area in my house.
Pretty much all the bedrooms in our house have beds that are in different sizes, meaning that a sheet that fits in one bed doesn’t necessarily fit in others.
The struggle to find the pieces that belong to the same bedding set is real! So much so that I have often washed, tumble dried sheets and done the bed again with the same set just to avoid the hassle of trying to find the matching pieces.
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that we don’t have good system to organize the bed sheets, comforters and blankets.
My husband does laundry too and he puts the sheets where it seems most fitting to him (or whatever shelf that has space) and the linen closet turns into a big mess in no time no matter what system I try to put in place to keep it organized!
But I have read and tried the Konmari method to many areas of my house and life so I thought this was a good time to try and organize my linen cupboard.
Marie Kondo, the author of the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing shows us an effective way to fold clothes and I decided to give it a try with my linen.
If you need more info in the konmari method you can read my post about it here.
For now please check how my linen closet shelves currently look like:
How to organize a linen closet?
I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do from the linen closet ideas I had seen before.
My linen space is made with tall and deep shelves and I knew there was a better way to optimize this space other than just dumping all the sheets randomly like we had been doing for so long!
I knew boxes and baskets would be perfect linen closet storage ideas to go inside these shelves keeping things tidy!
So I went ahead and got myself some plastic baskets in the dollar tree store. They will act as my linen closet organizers.
Linen storage ideas
You can get these linen closet baskets from Amazon, they even have more fancy ones. But I am trying to keep a budget of $50 for this project (I have 2 linen cupboards that need organizing) so I went with these large plastic baskets which were the cheapest I could get from the colors I wanted.
Organizing linen closet ideas
So the first thing we have to do when following the Konmari advice is to get everything out of the cupboards and onto the bed.
I followed Marie Kondo method: pick each sheet in your hands and ask the question ‘Does this item spark joy?’.
This is important for me because I have a lot of linen and some were very old from our other house which had different bed sizes.
It also made me realize that having color matching sheets really brings me a lot of joy and I wanted to make sure that I had the full set on the bed so I started getting rid of the sheets that were incomplete (lost during moving most likely…).
I took the incomplete sets to the shed because I know they will be useful for my other DIY and painting projects. The other sets that still looked good but didn’t spark joy were put on the pile to be given away to charity.
Once I went through all of them and kept the ones that brought me joy it was time to separate them into piles of size (single, double beds etc).
One thing that I realized was that after getting rid of the linen that did not spark joy I had a much smaller amount to deal with!
I really wanted to make sure that the complete set of linen for a given bed would be all together.
Folding ideas for linen closet
We love pillows here at home and have normally several in each bed. The problem is that the duvet sets normally only come with 2 pillow cases. And I end up having to mix and match the colors. This does not bring me joy at all! Lol
So I brainstormed a solution; with all my linen available on the bed I could already make the matches that would go well together and create a linen ‘package’ that would contain the exact amount of pillowcases I needed for the beds.
For instance, I have 6 pillows on my bedroom bed. I then picked up the duvet cover, the sheet that fits that mattress size and 6 pillowcase with matching colors and folded it all together as shown below:
I have folded it all until they became a folding package about the size of half the length of my basket. This will make sure they never get lost!
And when I change the beds, these pieces will all be washed together making it super easy for me to maintain the system and place them organized back in the linen closet storage space.
Now it was time to fold everything. What I did was to make sure all pillow cases were folded together with its duvet cover and sheet.
Organize a linen closet in baskets
The konmari method also teaches that clothes should not be buried under other clothes, that you should fold and store them as a filing system standing up.
That is why we needed the baskets too to make sure everything is contained into these linen storage units. Otherwise the folded sheet would just fall and become a big mess again!
But if you store your sheets in drawers you could possibly do this organization without using all these baskets or boxes. But in my linen storage cabinet shelves I have no other solution.
Considering the space I had, I decided to make piles that would fit the basket width or length depending of how large the folding parcel would become.
For the twin beds I managed to fit 4 sets in a basket. For the queen and king bed sets I could only fit 2 or 3 complete sets folded together. See below:
The last bit of organizing was to communicate with my family, making sure everyone understands how the system works now.
I also had to demonstrate how to fold so my family can do that themselves too.
If can also add tags to your linen closet storage bins so everyone knows what is inside each of them – specially if you have all thing bed and bath inside your closet. I didn’t feel that I needed to add any to mine.
I hope this post has given you some linen closet organization ideas so you can get started with your own cabinet.
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