Around the House...Wrapping Paper Organization

Puxatawny Phil and Sir Walter Wally may or may not have correctly predicted an early spring but I've already got urge to take on a few spring cleaning type organization projects. I took the opportunity during our snowy weekend a few weeks ago to work on a project I've been thinking about for a while.

While I love the layout, our house is limited in its storage capabilities.  Our attic is only partially, very partially, floored and we have no basement.  So we are really left with the garage and our closets to put things.  Our master closet is the biggest and therefore seems to be the most popular place where stuff is dumped stored.  One of the things I keep here is the wrapping paper, which, up until recently fit fairly well in a Rubbermaid gift wrap storage bin.  However, things were starting to overflow and finding stuff in that bin was a pain. Most of the time I would have to take everything out of the bin to get at what I was looking for.  Time for a new solution.  Floor space is at a premium in there, so the only logical place to go was up, taking advantage of vertical storage space.

I did some online and Pinterest searching and saw a lot of posts about the Elfa Door and Wall Rack System from the Container Store.  Thanks to a Christmas gift card and the annual 30% off Elfa sale I picked up a system for the back of our closet door.  I used their customizing tool to pick out the components I wanted.  A week or so later, I was in business.

Installation was fairly easy but first I cleaned up the area a bit. Needless to say, we don't look behind our closet door all that often so there were quite a few cobwebs.

First step was to install the bar that the baskets would mount.  It uses brackets over and under the door that are adjustable.  This was a bit tricky to line everything up and it probably would have taken half the time if I wasn't doing it by myself but I managed with minimal effort (and swearing).  After that, all I had to was baskets and load them up.

Here's the finished product.  I had to lean way into the clothes rack and take two pictures to show the whole thing, our closet runs horizontally to the door, not vertically.

As you can see this was a hugely wasted space that works great for all of the wrapping supplies.  Even better, there's still an empty basket...room to grow.  I also like how all of the baskets are adjustable.  In the future, I'll probably pick up another one of the deeper baskets for the smaller gift bags but right now everything fits perfectly.

One project down, on to something else...a gallery wall in Katherine's room!