Organizing Our Mud Room

Hey y’all! I hope you guys had a good weekend! Ours was pretty chill overall. I finished work on our guest bedroom that you can read all about here. Last night I laid in bed and thought of what I was going to tackle next around this house. Then it hit me…the dreaded Mud Room. You know, the place where all things go when you don’t have anywhere else to put them. I honestly haven’t organized this room since we moved in and it shows! Our mud room is also where our little fur baby Mickey D. the cat sleeps at night. He jumps up on the tallest cabinet so he can be high in his mighty corner overseeing all the land. Sometimes we will catch him in there even when it’s not bedtime. It’s his little haven. So of course because this is his designated eat, sleep and poop area it does get it’s fair share of hair! There was even hair on the inside of the cabinet doors??? Ugghh! Needless to say this room needed some major TLC! I hope you will enjoy this little blog about how I spent the day organizing our mud room.

My first step was to tackle these cabinets above the sink. As you can see from the photo below it was absolute mayhem! This is huge for me to show you what a mess. It makes me cringe just looking at it! I started by sorting everything in categories. My three categories when organizing are always throw away, donate, and keep.

After I sorted everything out I categorized it by type. I then wiped down the cabinets inside to be sure that all cat hair was eliminated. I found a cute litle Sephora bag and filled that with our ten thousand batteries. I put all of Mickey’s stuff in a basket for easy access when I need to pull it down. I sorted all the cleaning supplies and put that in my Grove Collaborative bucket as a catchall. I love this little bucket! I had these old kitchen canisters that I filled with dry cat food, canned cat food and my essential oils. We also have a little piggy bank that I’ve had since college to put all of our spare change in.

Coat Closet Before:

My next challenge was the coat closet. I realized while organizing this closet that I have waaaay to many jean jackets! Who has 5 jean jackets?! Anywho…I unloaded everything from this deep closet that seemed to be like the wardrobe in Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was never ending! On the bright side I did find my favorite yard stick. As a child I had an obsession with yard sticks. My mom can attest to this. I always had one when I was teaching to my make believe students aka my stuffed animals. I would use the yard stick as a pointer on the chalkboard just as one of my teachers used to do. I felt such great authority with it. So funny! Sorry for that little tangent down memory lane.

I then went through the coats and pulled out ones that I needed to donate. I hung up all my scarves that were just crumpled up on the shelf, and went through my twenty million lunch bags. Again I’m not sure why I need 10 lunch bags?  I also have an embarrassing amount of shopping bags. Some days they do come in handy if you need to take stuff to someone’s house, so I kept the nicer ones and threw out the rest! I also stumbled across my husband’s Scream mask which I’m not going to lie startled me a bit. He tried to scare me last Halloween without success. So naturally it scared me when I reached for it in the depths of this Narnia closet just thinking it was a beanie or something. I’m sure he’s getting a kick out of this little tidbit.

After everything was out of the closet I neatly put back the items that really needed to go in here like outdoor pillows not in use, boots, citronella candles I’ll be using this Summer, 2 lunch bags, and a neat bag to keep all of my shopping bags. I put all of our extension cords in this pink picnic basket. You would think that we were the Griswold’s with all the extension cords we own! According to Chris you can never have enough.

I was starting to see the light! I wiped off the counters and put a few decorative pieces out just to liven it up a bit. Our sink in here was apparently the previous owner’s paint sink that they never really cared about because there are paint stains all over it. Hence why I have a planter in it. Eventually it needs to be replaced along with these heinous orange counters! Not my choice, but they are fine for now. I just enjoy all the storage in this space!

Awhile ago I hung up a little gallery wall of items I picked out at Hobby Lobby. This room doesn’t get any natural light unless the garage door is open so I thought it would be best to decorate with fake plants in here.

There you have it! I feel much better about this space knowing that there aren’t items just waiting to fall out of these cabinets when you open them! I feel lighter after this little organization project. On to the next!

I hope you have enjoyed this little “Organize With Me” blog. It’s a little different from what I’ve done in the past, but I’m not going to lie I kind of dig it! Like the door mat says: “Life’s a Garden, dig it!

Thank you for flying by my nest today!

xoxo,

Robyn 🙂

 

 

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