Basement Progress: Laundry Land Linen Cabinet

Our laundry room is massive and packs a lot of storage punch!

We are grateful and know how fortunate we are for this, as typical laundry lands are the size of a small closet. 

Of course, I love that I am able to use the space to hold all sorts of home maintenance items, like lower level cleaning supplies, painting products, overflow of bulk household item purchases, light bulbs and vacuum attachments.  And now, it's also the home for our lower level linen cabinet.

Our basement was never finished with a linen closet.  There really wasn't a great place to put one in when we originally finished the lower level, so the first time around we just stashed our extra bedding and bathroom linens in our master bedroom closet.  Now that we have remodeled and opened up the previous walk-in closet into a full dressing room, we lost the linen storage.  We did, however, address the need for a linen cabinet when making tweaks to the laundry room throughout the reno process.  The treadmill moved from the laundry room to the dressing room, and the toy/game cabinet from our old playroom, moved into the laundry room.

Still with me?  Confusing, I know.  Just making what we have work for us.

Now that the basement reno is nearly complete, and we just relocated ourselves and our master bedroom back downstairs, we really needed to evaluate how we were using the cabinet for our extra bedding essentials.

I started out by adding some doors to the front of the cabinet {which is all part of the EFFECTIV line at IKEA}, just to conceal things a bit, since there was already so much open storage in the room.  Plus, I don't really look forward to sleeping on dusty sheets....

The top of the cabinet holds some extra coverlets and puppy bath towels.

The next portion of the cabinet holds our bed sheets, pet supplies, extra cleaning rags, blankets, shower curtains, pillow shams and other household linens.

To fold our bedsheets {which is typically a nightmare}, I turned to my BFF, Martha Stewart, to show me the way.  Once the sheets were folded, I just tucked them into their matching pillow case to keep everything corralled and together.  Now, when we need to change our bedding, I can just grab the entire set and not have to dig for matching pieces!


For the rag and pet supply bins, I just printed out some simple labels on cardstock and clipped them to the bins with cheapo clothes pins that I Mod Podged with scrapbook paper.

The two baskets on the lower shelf is where the random/miscellaneous household linens are folded and contained.

The bottom cabinet holds our extra duvet inserts, since we tend to switch them out based on the current season.

We contain our upper level linens a little differently.  Since we use our technical teeny tiny linen closet to hold our medications and vacuum cleaner, we just use a chest of drawers in the guest room to house all of the upstairs bedding in a very similar manner to here.

My biggest linen closet tip is to only keep 2-3 sets of sheets max, per bed.  That way, if you are washing one set, you can keep the other set on the bed.  We have the same philosophy for towels.  We keep all towels in cabinets right in the bathroom, and each person has two sets of towels, so when one set is being laundered, the other is out on a hook.  This really cuts down on the amount of storage we need for all of our linens in our home, and keeps our cabinets and drawers streamlined.

Now that I am writing up this post and looking at the pictures, I am really wanting to dress up the front of that linen cabinet.  So much so that it just went on the ol' home project list!  Wahoo!

So how do your show your linens some love?  In the laundry room?  A linen closet?  A cabinet?  What other linen closet organizing tips and tricks do you have?