I have these two great closets in my upstairs hallway, but their use and function are so hard to maximize! They have slanted ceilings but they are rather deep closets.
Throughout the year my kids get invited to random birthday parties for friends at school. Since I don’t like going to the store every week I generally keep a small stock pile of likely appropriate gifts for multiple ages. This is why I sometimes overbuy at Christmas! Its really hard to pass up a good deal!
Because the closets are hard to use, I decided long ago to create a gift closet. My gift closet holds everything from the actual gifts, to wrapping paper, tissue paper, and bows. Until recently it also had a lot of random chaos thrown into it!
Look at how awful it looks to open the door…
I decided that I would finally tackle this closet! I needed access to my wrapping paper afterall!
A purging/organizing project is never pretty, until its all done! You have to literally pull EVERYTHING out, otherwise you don’t know what else is hiding in the space. I always like to ensure I have a solid block of uninterrupted time. For some of you that may be easier to achieve if you don’t have kids underfoot asking a million questions about every tiny thing!
Until you pull everything out, rather than just pulling out the obvious surface junk that doesn’t belong, then you can’t fully organize the space. I realized that I was actually storing gift bags in 3 different places between the two closets!! I decided to consolidate them and get rid of more than half of them.
After getting rid of stuff, and using a couple more bins, my closet is so much more exciting to open!
Check out these before and after pictures!
Before! 
After!
Inside the long bin at the bottom is my wrapping paper. I like using an ‘under the bed’ bin because it allows me to keep a minimal amount of paper, and none of it gets squished or crushed! I use the red lid bins for a variety of tissue paper (I use one for white, and another for multiple colours), one for bows, and one for small gift boxes. I also previously rested some scissors and tape on top of one of the bins, but it made it harder to open the bin. I decided to set up a small photo box for my ‘wrapping utensils’. It holds my scissors, tape, a couple gift tag stickers and a couple sharpies perfectly. That way I can simply pull out that box while wrapping, and it has everything that I need other than the wrapping paper! The box also makes it harder for anyone else to walk away with my supplies!!
I finished this project just before I wrapped all of my Christmas stuff, and it made my wrapping such a thrill! When my space is free of clutter, so is my mind!
What challenges do you have with your wrapping storage? What tricks do you use for storing it all?
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