Conquered Closet: Kara's Storage Wars Won

Welcome back Kara of Kara Paslay Designs whose talents seem to know no bounds - when she isn't merchandising some gorgeous display at Anthropologie, she is working with her husband on one fabulous DIY after the next (for example their her dining room and scrap wood busts?). If you have somehow not already devoured her blog, pencil that into your schedule because its so very worth it. So I knew she would have some clever storage solutions for those of us not so blessed with lots of closet space.



Hello! I'm Kara Paslay and that handsome fella in the photo below is my husband, Tim. We write the blog Kara Paslay Designs, and we are super excited to be here today!



I have to admit when Mrs. Limestone told me the topic of discussion for this series of guest posts, I was a little bit bummed. . . mainly because the couple of closets that I do have in my home are nothing special. They are somewhat organized, but definitely not worthy of a blog post. So I started to think about an issue that I'm guessing many of us have.

Living in an older cottage style house, our storage space is pretty limited. This style of house was built with small closets that are few and far between. Because of this, I have found ways to conceal a lot of my clutter necesseities. Today I am going to go over one of those ways, but you can pop over to my blog to see more storage ideas- both hidden and exposed! :)

Buying or building pieces of furniture that have lots of drawers provide you with instant organization! Below you can see the media console that my husband and I built with a bunch of old drawers we found at flea markets.

In order to build this piece, we gathered a bunch of mismatched drawers from a local flea market. Then Tim (my husband) built boxes for each drawer to fit in. We also bought a few metal files and a mirror for a special project!

After the individual drawer boxes were built, Tim built one large box to hold all the drawers. Here are a few pictures we took as we were trying to figure out exactly how things would fit together.

We designed the piece so that the overall feel was a structured and clean even though there is a lot going on. The whole project took a lot of planning, figuring, and refiguring but in the end we were happy with the result! :)

We not only love the look, but we love that each drawer or space is used to organize/hide a different thing, like this drawer which fits our DVD's perfectly.

And like this mirror that rotates to reveal our DVD player on movie night, but conceals it the rest of the time. You can watch this this video of us showing how it works on The Nate Berkus Show.

We also designed the piece to have an opening that perfectly fits a collection of our magazines.

One drawer is used to store all my design consulting materials: graph paper, current catalogs, paint fans, and more.

So that's our 1 stop shop for clutter concealing! We hope that you've enjoyed reading about it and might be inspired to built something similar for yourself!

Thanks so much to Stefanie for having me!

Conquered Closet: Chloe's Dress Up Cabinet

Welcome back Rambling Renovators. If you have read my blog for long, you know I am one of this blogs biggest fans (check out their beautiful bedroom and favorite nook to see why) . So naturally I had to ask them to share their own little (hint, hint) twist on a storage solution

Hello Brooklyn Limestone readers! I’m so excited Stefanie asked me to be a part of her master closet makeovers series. While my own master closet is in shambles with a wardrobe that needs to be edited, mismatched hangers, and stray shoes everywhere, my little 2.5 year old daughter Chloe has a closet that any adult would envy.

After tiring of seeing her costumes and play accessories all about, I was inspired by this pin to build a costume closet. I found an old 4-drawer dresser at the Salvation Army and tossed out all but one drawer. We sanded the dresser, added trim and a shelf, and painted it.



My girl loves anything yellow so I pasted some decorative paper on the inside and hung a yellow mirror on the outside.



With the addition of a hanging rod and some hooks, she now has the perfect place to corral all her tutus, costumes, superhero capes, jewellry, and princess shoes.

The bottom drawer holds smaller accessories like masks, gloves, purses – and of course kitty cat ears!



Now that Chloe has her costumes out on display, two surprising things have happened – she plays with her costumes more, and she likes keeping them neat and orderly! She’ll even ask me to put things back on hangers when playtime is over. Weird kid :) Maybe I should put pretty wallpaper in my closet and it’ll entice me to keep things neat.

Conquered Closet: Plain & Fancy Basement

Welcome Amy from from Plain & Fancy Living who is not only gorgeous and talented (take a look at her DIY version of a beautiful piece of artwork) but is also organized to boot! Today she is taking us underground with a peek into her storage area so we can see simple and smart solution to a problem almost any homeowner struggles with: basement overun.

I am happy to share a project that my husband and I tackled over the holiday break. I think everyone is in the mood to organize and shed some clutter for the New Year. We decided to buy industrial shelves for our basement from our local hardware store.

We assembled the shelves and started sorting through the boxes. We now have a large "yard sale" pile.

I knew that I wanted to be able to organize my serving pieces, entertaining and holiday decor. I intentionally left lots of room on the shelves to retrieve items as I need them and I wanted a place for new items that I will purchase during the year.

These adjustable shelves are perfect for our needs because each holds up to 800 lbs. We don't have to worry about overloading them. I can easily see what is on each shelf and I organized items by color (clear, silver and white). I put seasonal decor all on one set of shelves.

Thanks so much for letting me visit!