January 19, 2017

The Cleaning Closet

This past fall we embarked on three major closet organizing projects – in one week! I cannot take credit for any of the work of installing and building these closets and organizers (we hired someone), but I can take credit for the plan and organization of each project ;).

I’ve had a ‘cleaning closet’ since we moved into our home eight years ago. It’s a large coat closet in the mudroom – you can see the before here. I’ve experimented with a lot of different combinations of shelves and organizers, but always knew that a dedicated closet system would be the best route when it was in the budget. We have a Martha Stewart closet system from Home Depot in our master closet and love it so much that  I ‘built’ one online and had it installed.

As someone that LOVES to clean, sells homekeeping products, and tests all sorts of cleaning products and tools for a living….the cleaning closet is dreamy! It keeps my supplies organized and cute simultaneously.

Here’s what we did:

• completely emptied the closet
• removed the wire shelving and hooks
• filled holes
• painted the closet interior white
• installed shelving

Once everything was installed, it was time to figure out the best way to organize supplies and goods.

This took awhile – I didn’t want to spend a lot of money filling it up with organizers but I still wanted it to look cute and coordinated. I pulled out what I had and started there. Once I had taken inventory I decided that I could use a couple baskets to pull the area together. I keep clunkier things like dog stuff, batteries, and light bulbs in the aqua woven baskets and decided not to label them because you can pretty much see what’s inside by peering in the basket.

You’ll see that we also keep some shoes on the shelves in here as well – my husband and I keep smaller shoes and sandals in this closet.

I used cleaning buckets (found in my store) for a couple caddies – one is my dusting caddy and the other is for sprayers for my glass spray bottles. I keep bathroom supplies in each bathroom in the same cleaning bucket to keep cleaning the bathrooms easy.

The far right section of the closet is just for floor items and dusters – the top shelf holds floor and carpet cleaning supplies. Keeping like items together is always a good idea when you’re organizing – it makes locating anything that much easier. I used giant S hooks and knew that they’d work great for hanging tools.

My favorite shelves – DIY cleaner heaven – this is where I keep Borax, baking soda, washing soda, and Epsom salt, empty glass bottles, Castile and Sal Suds soaps, and a handful of pre-mixed DIY cleaners – here are oodles of DIY cleaner posts. Did you know I wrote a book, The Organically Clean Home, about DIY cleaning? You can find it here – it’s pretty awesome if I do say so myself!

Here’s a close-up of one of the cleaning buckets – totally ready for a new recipe or two 🙂  This also works well to allow any sprayers to completely air dry after being washed out.

The top shelf is more or less decor but still items we use – clothespins, scrub brushes, bars of castile soap.

Love having my cleaning recipes right on the spray bottles – this makes DIY cleaning a breeze! You can find my glass spray bottles and DIY cleaning recipe labels here.

If you haven’t set up a dusting caddy, you totally should! This post details my dusting caddy in detail.

I use my Clean Mama Home white bar mop towels for a lot of cleaning – they wash up beautifully and have a luxurious look and feel. Keeping a basket of them at the ready makes it easy to use them.

And of course my beloved Clean Mama Home microfiber cloths have their own shelf too – I have a basket of utility cloths (aqua), a basket of polishing cloths (gray), and a basket of microfiber pads and dusters for the floor.

If you’re looking for the products in the post, you can find all of the Clean Mama Home products in my shop here and I’ve added a slider below with some of the other products that I used in my cleaning closet. I hope it helps you as you organize your cleaning supplies! If you haven’t considered eliminating toxic chemicals in your cleaning, I hope you try out a DIY recipe or two and give it a try. It’s easier than you might think!

This post is part of my HOME TOUR – go here to see more of our home – I’ll keep adding to it in 2017.