Linens and Things

Continuing the theme of quality of life improvements from last week, a very simple one put in place a year or so ago was reorganizing the cabinets in the linen hallway.

Back when we looked at this place I didn’t pay too mention attention as to what the POs used these cabinets as what did it matter — nor did I have any grand plans for that area of the house. Originally the walls of this hallway were the same puke-brown as most of the rest of the house and the cabinet doors and drawers were white, but a couple of years back when our favorite house painted the north hallway these all were painted a pretty green.

Here’s some before and after images: the last one is pretty true to the actual shade of green in the space.

As you will notice, this area contains A LOT of storage. The closet at the end of hall contains the hot water heater for that wing. It and the rest of the cabinets and drawers in this hallway are original to the house. We assume that because the Doc who built this place had three kids, each column of cabinets and drawers was assigned to one of them. Each column consists of a set of four large drawers, a folding drawer/platform above them and then a large cabinet with adjustable shelving above

And therein lies the problem with the cabinets: said adjustable shelving is very deep. Too deep for me to easily reach the far ends of after the first two shelves or so. Thus since moving in, this is one area of purgatory that has seen a lot of shuffling about, changes and reconfigurations.

Currently the left column is used for linens with the drawers holding items like extra pillow cases, a couple of heating pads, random photography backdrops and other miscellaneous fabric things.

I was never a huge fan of the collapsable tote bins but now I must say they are awesome for storing sheet sets. Whenever I want/need to change the bed sheets I can just pull out a tote that has a clean set of sheets within it and carry it to the bedroom. Then I use the same tote to carry the sheets I take off the bed out to the laundry. Once the sheets are clean and dry it’s just a matter of folding them, dropping them into the cube tote and popping that back into the cabinet. So much easier than when it was just a couple of shelves with sheets stuffed atop them.

The middle cabinet and drawer column then houses random craft and art supplies with a few drawers being the perfect spot to store my yarn stash. The bins are mainly repurposed DVD storage containers as my deep dark secret is that I have a small horde of random interesting bits and bobs that I use when I make random stuff. Some of which is even kind of sort of art. Like say the crazy cork sculpture in the butler’s pantry.

Then the right side holds all sorts of random things like carry bags, spare bird toys and most importantly, news print for the boys’ cages — makes morning cleanup each day so much easier.

I’m sure I’ll tidy and reorganize the cabinets and drawers again and again — especially if I’m successful in making use of much of my crafting stashes, but this space is quite a luxury to have. So much storage means that the downstairs room of the studio building is no longer full of stuff, and slowly but surely the drawers and cabinets in the spare bathroom will no longer befull of random things.