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Before & After: A Craft Closet Gets a Smart Overhaul for $72

Shifrah Combiths
Shifrah Combiths
With five children, Shifrah is learning a thing or two about how to keep a fairly organized and pretty clean house with a grateful heart in a way that leaves plenty of time for the people who matter most. Shifrah grew up in San Francisco, but has come to appreciate smaller town life in Tallahassee, Florida, which she now calls home. She's been writing professionally for twenty years and she loves lifestyle photography, memory keeping, gardening, reading, and going to the beach with her husband and children.
published Mar 7, 2022
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Credit: Shifrah Combiths

We are lucky to have a big, awesome closet near the kids’ playroom. We use it to store all of our games, craft supplies, our printer, all kinds of paper, workbooks, games, and even some bulkier toys. Yes, it gets just as messy as it sounds like it would get! It’s a convenient storage spot, but without being organized, it gets to be the biggest, most stressful rat’s nest you’ve ever seen. 

After months at home and extra heavy use, the crap closet — AHEM, excuse me — the craft closet was in desperate need of a major overhaul. The solution? These 8×8 Iris storage boxes.

My main use for these boxes (I got two sets of six for $72) is storing games. Games in their original boxes are one of the biggest offenders when it comes to wasting space. The boxes are bulky and, most of the time, full of empty space! Furthermore, the boxes inevitably break and add even more visual mess to your space. 

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Credit: Shifrah Combiths

Consolidating games into the plastic storage boxes transformed our game collection and saved our closet. Sliding out the plastic boxes is so simple compared to the frustration of trying to unstack and re-stack cardboard boxes of various shapes and sizes. In addition, by ditching the boxes, we can fit so many more games into the same amount of space. 

I combine multiple games in each storage box, when I can, choosing to put games that are easy to separate together. For instance, if I put card games in the same box, I’ll make sure each set is rubber-banded together. I include instructions straight in the plastic storage box as well. (And I remember that all the instructions are online, too.) 

Another super important part of making these awesome boxes as useful as possible is labeling them with the contents. You can imagine how hard it would be trying to locate the exact game you want without labels. 

While I did other things to organize this out-of-control closet, such as replace our paper holder and get rid of a bunch of stuff, these storage boxes are the real MVPs. They made possible this beautifully organized space that now makes all of us go ahhhh. Oh, and yep, it still looks like this, weeks later.

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Before & After