Optimizing Our Toddler’s Closet

This post is sponsored by The Hardware Hut

We live in a relatively small house at just under 1350 sqft so storage space is at a premium around here. With not even a coat or linen closet to speak of, we’ve had to get pretty crafty about how and where we store the things that we need but don’t use on a daily basis.

The closet in our daughter’s recently made-over big girl room is the perfect example of a space that needed to serve multiple purposes: it needed to store her clothes, bed linens, and it also needed to serve as toy storage too. We don’t have the luxury of having an extra room / space dedicated just for her toys so making due with the space we do have was the name of the game.

Luckily we started with a decent closet system and all it really needed was a few tweaks to optimize the space we had to fit our needs. We’ve done this once before so I knew it was possible to maximize storage space without expanding the physical footprint. Here’s where we started:

With a lot of extra time on our hands thanks to quarantine, now was the perfect time to finally tackle this project and call this room complete once and for all!

Much like our last closet project, we decided that four hanging rods for a toddler was completely unnecessary and a total waste of valuable space. Combined with the dresser we also have in her room, we decided that two hanging rods vs the original four* was more than enough space to store all her clothing.

*We did receive (and will keep) two additional rods plus the matching brackets should we ever sell and the new owners want four hanging rods again.

Now that our daughter is older and capable of getting herself dressed, we moved all her clothing from the top row (where we kept it when she was younger and prone to pulling clothing off the hangers for fun) to the left side of the closet. This new set-up allows her to grab a shirt from the lower rod and a pair of bottoms from her dresser and get herself ready for the day without ever needing my help.

We also changed out the standard grey two-piece rods for these sleek gold ones from The Hardware Hut. Not only do they look way better, they give an off the shelf closet system a custom look, and I love that they’re one solid piece which means hangers no longer get snagged at the intersection. It’s the little things!

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On the right side (where we nixed the other two hanging rods) it freed up a whole bunch of space for us to install two more melamine shelves which we desperately needed to store all.the.toys!

We categorized all the toys we were previously storing haphazardly in the closet and decanted them into these lidded containers. I photographed the contents of each container on a white background, had mini-wallets printed through an online print shop, and then taped a photo to the front and back to easily reflect what was inside each container. The photos are easily identifiable by my daughter who can’t yet read and allows her to visually see where things belong.

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Adding the two extra shelves allowed us store 16 bins (!!!) of toys that were previously just jumbled together in a bunch of mismatched fabric totes. Plus we have extra room to spare on the top shelf!

To make the outside just as pretty as the inside, we added these knobs to the bi-fold doors and I could just die, they’re so good (and solid too)!

I’m extremely happy with how much space we gained and how much more we’re now able to store in the closet just by making a few key changes and re-configuring the closet layout. If you’ve got some free time on your hands (who doesn’t these days) now’s the perfect time to tackle a project like this and reap the benefits for years to come!

The Hardware Hut has a huge selection of closet organizers and accessories to optimize your closet needs too – and better yet, everything I used for ours is currently on sale too!