Before & After: Becky’s Brilliant Basket-Based DIY Closet Organizer System

Project by: Becky
Location: Victoria, BC, Canada

I can only admit this because I have now dealt with the skeleton in my closet, but I am was (fingers crossed) a huge clothes piler. As a large-scale, whole-house renovation left us needing to stretch the last dollars a little farther, my husband and I decided to tackle much of the finishing details ourselves.

One item on our list was fitting out our master bedroom closet. It is not a huge closet, but at 5’X7′, it is a walk-in closet. I had a beautiful plan with built-in drawers, specialty shelves, hooks, shoe racks and a clothes rod. It was going to cost upwards of $2000.

Four years went by and priority went to flooring, finishing the kitchen and putting up trim. I began to realize a few things:
1.$2000 for a closet doesn’t just appear out of nowhere
2.I now had a walk-in clothes pile and the piles weren’t getting any smaller and I wasn’t getting any younger.
3.Who says a closet system needs to have proper drawers? Drawers have never worked for me anyway! I have always just left clothes in piles or in laundry baskets.

So I came up with a plan to use laundry baskets instead of drawers and I built my own closet system. It took me the better part of 4 days to finish (but I was making sure that I measured twice and cut once!) Each shelf is 24″ deep and fits a laundry basket perfectly.

I used 1X3 and 1X4 pine boards which I sanded and painted and then screwed or used a nail gun to put together. I chose to use boards instead of plywood because the shelves are so deep, I wanted light to filter into the back of the basket cubbies. I think the folks at Walmart wondered why they kept selling out of laundry baskets. I bought them out of laundry baskets three times!

Cost for wood and supplies was around $200 and the 22 baskets came in at just under $100. Paint color on the back wall is Benjamin Moore Dark Pewter.

Thanks, Becky!

Re-edited from a post originally published 9.3.14-nt

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