Linen Closet

I have always hated the linen closet in our house. It has always seemed to cause more of a mess and be counter to organization than anything else. At twenty-two inches deep, it suffers from the usual problems of having such deep shelves: things get shoved in the back and forgotten.  The other problem with this linen closet was that, when renovating the entire house, all the doors were changed to (fake) raised panel doors. However, I could not just pickup matching replacement closet doors at my local home center.  So, I had to make custom doors (and drawer faces) to match the regular doors in the house. I also found some elegant and inexpensive pulls that match the door knobs on the regular doors.

Although the new cabinet actually has slighly less volume than the original, it turns out that it can store just as much—if not more—than it did before. This further corroborates my theory that it is not total storage space, but organization that counts.

Drawers

The bottom half of the linen closet has always been a no-brainer: large, full extension drawers. Towels and blankets have never before been so organized.

Lazy Susan

To solve the deep closet problem, I replaced the upper half of the cabinet with a lazy susan. This idea came to me when, while pondering what I would do with the upper half of this closet, I was looking for a snack in the corner cabinet in my kitchen. This cabinet has a lazy susan too, and it occured to me that a lazy susan would as well solve the same problem in the linen closet.