Summer is just about over, and the new school year is about to begin, so take some time now to help your children get organized. Transition times are a great reminder to do some cleaning out & organizing. Just as the change in seasons reminds us to switch our clothes, the end or beginning of a school year is a great reminder to organize all those categories that go along with having children.

1. Whether you collect school papers in a bin, a drawer, a cabinet or all over your house, plan for at least a one hour project to pull them all together and sort through with your child. Make a Yes and No pile. “Yes” means you want to keep it and “No” means it goes. For those items you keep (like beautiful artwork or creative writing pieces) find a portfolio or bin big enough to hold all you have plus some more. If you have a prolific artist or writer, you may need one per school year. Label it with the grade and your child’s name. Then designate a spot where these boxes or bins will be stored, like a shelf in the closet.

2. If you’ve been meaning to make a scrapbook for your child, don’t let perfection stop you! Gather their memorabilia like certificates, special cards, ribbons or extra photos of your child’s special moments, create a simple scrapbook with your child. Let them decorate the pages with stickers, markers or other accessories if they like. Put in everything you have collected so far. For the upcoming school year, have a place where you will collect new items. A small desk drawer or an accordion folder work well.

Click here to read more expert tips from professional organizer Debbie Lillard in the Closet Factory’s “Expert Tips” blog.

Tags: children, closets, clutter, custom, do it yourself, expert, guide, how to, lillard, makeover, organizing, school, space, storage, tips

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It’s no secret that most homeowners find redesigning and organizing their space a never-ending task. Most of us aren’t aware of the simple things that can save us hours of frustration, thus freeing us from a hodgepodge organized space.

Instead of spending hours in a department store looking for answers, get inside tips from Closet Factory’s Kay Wade, V.P. Design & Head Designer.

On the Closet Factory’s Facebook page, we have a section called “Ask K,” where you can get your questions answered directly by “K” herself. Everything from how to tips, preferences on accessory usage, questions from a Closet Factory design expert, and more!

Click here to get started!

Tags: accessories, closetfactory.com, closets, custom, do it yourself, downloads, guide, how to, ikea, interior design, kay, organizing, questions, target, tips, wade

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A few months ago, HomeConstructionImprovement.com hired Closet Factory to design and install some storage solutions for a kids play room makeover. They decided to take a break from all the products and hire someone to design and install the cabinetry and were “VERY happy with the quality and results” achieved for their project.

The following is their Closet Factory Review of our Products and Service.

Design Consultation

Closet Factory offers a free design consultation at your home before making a purchase. Senior Design Consultant Laurie Miller from the Boston Closet Factory came to our home to measure the space and find out about our needs for the kids play room.

Here are some before stills:

Results

The designer recommended solid mahogany tops for the window seats, bookcase and credenza and we are very impressed with that decision. Click here to see the project results and view the entire construction process!

Tags: bench, boston, closet, closets, custom, factory, how to, Kids Stuff, organization, redesign, room, storage, wood

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I’ve designed many custom closets, and I’ve seen many more done by our Closet Factory network all across the nation. While I’ve seen some very exotic designs, in truth, some of my favorite closets were simply well laid-out closet designs with really good drawer placement and interesting hardware. It’s surprising how the addition of a decorative handle, knob or even the combination of both can alter how a person feels about their new closet. Plus, knobs and handles are a very inexpensive style upgrade.

As with most home improvement projects, people have a general budget they wish to work within for their custom closet design. When I’m working with a client, I like to offer up style ideas that have the highest impact on defining their personal space and ever so importantly, keep them in line with their budgetary requirements.

Even the simplest closets can benefit from a knob or handle upgrade. Plus handles and knobs can be changed out in the future as styles change so they really are very versatile. Here are some images of just a few of my personal favorites.

Remember that getting your own custom closet starts with a free design consultation!

Tags: closet, closet hardware, closets, custom closets, handles and knobs, handles for closets, knobs for closets

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It’s 8:00 am. Your youngest child is mid meltdown because you made her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the second time this week and peanut butter has been banned in her school. The milk is sour and your spouse left the house without taking the garbage out. Stressed? No, not really, you are relatively late at this point but the real anxiety hits you as you step in front of your closet and can’t find the striped shirt you wanted to wear with your newly tailored grey suit. Where is that belt? Your shoes are missing in action. You frantically move your entire wardrobe across your one sagging rod as you desperately search for the shirt. There are now more clothes on the floor then on the rod! You look down, where is the floor? You are now officially late.

It’s hard to imagine this scene playing out any differently across millions of homes every morning. But then the people living them don’t have closets organized by one of Closet Factory’s expert designers. Your child may still have the same meltdown over her PB&J and you may still be stuck taking out the trash and eating dry cereal, but once you step in front of a closet that was beautifully designed, manufactured and installed, there would be no visible signs of angst. Your perfectly pressed shirt would be hanging next to your newly tailored suit, possibly already waiting for you on a sleek valet rod. Your belt would be right there on that silky smooth belt glide. Look, there are your shoes; sitting neatly on a slanted shoe shelf complete with Lucite toe- stop. Just like the old saying “everything in its place and a place for everything”. Having a system designed and installed by a company like Closet Factory will have changed your closet and changed your life.

Being organized is one of the keys to living a less stressful life, whether it is in your closet, your laundry room, or your pantry, garage or home office. Knowing where all your “stuff” is located can be life altering. Having a custom storage unit designed to suit your specific needs is no longer a luxury but a necessity in these hectic times.

Here are some helpful tips in creating and realizing the closet of your dreams:

1. Oval rods are the most user-friendly for any kind of hanger. They will last and fully adjust through a lifetime of hemline trends.
2. Using shelf dividers will ultra-organize all your accessories.
3. Access everything with the ease of pull-out trays.
4. The easiest and least expensive way to “dress-up” your closet is with custom hardware or clear drawer faces.
5. Hamper drawers are the perfect place to put your dry cleaning or dirty items…so much better than the floor!
6. If you have a lot of shoes, straight adjustable shoe shelves are the most economical…maybe add one or two slanted shelves for those shoes you just can’t stop looking at!
7. Baskets are a great option for bulky items like work-out clothes or socks and underwear for the kids…they never fold anything anyway!

Custom storage systems such as those provided by Closet Factory will increase your useable space sometimes as much as 50-60% and can meld effortlessly into any décor and into any space you can think of. A space designed around your needs, budget and tastes, and all at a time that is convenient for you and in the comfort of your own home! What could be more custom tailored and only for you than that?

Tags: closet, closet tips, closets, custom closets

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Finding bike storage in the garage can often be a challenge.  Many people are fortunate enough to not only have a garage, but also have it organized with cabinets. Yet, even then, floor space is at a premium. So efficient bike storage usually means utilizing the walls or the ceiling whenever possible.   

As Head Designer at Closet Factory, I often teach our Design Consultants the advantages of the Racor and Pro-Stor products we carry so that they can make the proper recommendations to their clients.  For those of you that own bikes and need to store them, be sure to inquire about these when getting your space organized. 

Here are four of my favorite bike racks that take advantage of wall or ceiling space while minimizing the amount of floor space that is required for storing bikes.

1. Horizontal Bike Rack, this unit fits flush to the wall and conveniently holds 2 full-sized bikes. This bike rack is perfect for mounting on the back, right, or left walls of your garage. The single wire-shelf is a nice added feature that can be used for storing your bike helmets or other smaller gear.

2. Vertical Bike Rack, another option that mounts on the wall and holds 2 bikes. I like this rack’s added organization feature of two storage shelves specifically intended for your helmets and shoes. Personally, I think this particular rack also works particularly well tucked away into an apartment, townhouse, or condo for those city-dwellers that don’t have a garage.

3. Floor Mounted Vertical Bike Rack, this is the only rack I ever recommend that is floor-mounted. It is generally described as a floor-to-ceiling bike organizer. It holds 2 bikes perfectly, one above the other. This organizer not only works for a garage but I’ve used them effectively indoors in lofts and it could just as easily be installed on the private deck or balcony of a multi-unit housing structure.

4. Ceiling Mounted Bike Pulley, this is a perfect solution for a garage loaded with cars and other “stuff”. The bikes are suspended from anchored pulleys that are easily raised and lowered from the manual controls (not shown in this image). The bikes are out of the way when stored and readily available when you want to use one.

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Tags: bike racks, garage storage

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While writing this article I was faced with many various components of life which come up unexpectedly, causing myself to lose track. Talk about the irony of it all! I must say that writing this article has definitely helped me to reconfigure my goals and once again, regain focus, or as Dorothy and Dolores state in their book, Organizing for the Creative Person;

“F = Follow
O = One
C = Course
U = Until
S = Successful”

With winter holidays and New Years on the horizon, many of us are spinning circles, getting our houses ready to welcome in family, tying up loose strings, and thinking ahead to our goals for next year. It’s alright to have a lot of goals and dreams, but without properly
organizing your time and ideas, you’ll lose focus and show little achievement.

Take time to write down your goals, and concentrate on each one separately.
Start this by sectioning them off into these 4 groups:

1. Urgent and Important
Emergencies, deadlines, short-term goals – these goals are likely to change at the drop of a hat, as they can come up at any moment and any time, but need to be handled before anything else can be done. Always try to allow space for the unexpected, or use this time to add the perfect touches to goals in this next category.

2. Important but not Urgent
Goals here deserve your greatest amount of time and energy. When your schedule is properly planned and attended to, urgent matters are less likely to come up and cause trouble. Instead you are working to make things happen, moving closer to that flickering light at the end of the tunnel.

3. Urgent but not Important
Urgent matters are likely to come up, like your phone ringing profusely, new emails dinging your inbox, or just your little one repeatedly yelling MOM! MOM! MOM! Just because all of this commotion is happening around you, doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and rush to it. This is an easy thing for most of us to do, as the distractions sometimes seem like better ways spend your time. Exciting new ideas might be sprouting up all around you, but just jot them down and revisit them later. Sometimes ideas seem great at the moment, but in the end offer very little to achieving your goals.

4. Not Urgent and not Important
This is something that many of us don’t schedule in, but should. Although we don’t need to devote a lot of time to matters in this category, we do need it in order to maintain the ebb and flow of our goals. Use this time to add that final touch, send thank you notes, or just to recheck your work.

Tags: closet design, creative, organize

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“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity, from discord find harmony, in the middle of difficulty lays opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

Not everyone can follow the rule “a place for everything and everything in its place”, as some people enjoy many things happening at once around them. The questions are; “How do you find the simplicity, harmony and opportunity, when so much is going on around you” and “Where do you begin?”

First off, there’s nothing wrong with clutter. Many people find comfort in the nests they have built around them, collecting treasures and memories through their life. However when the clutter grows out of control, problems can arise, so this is where you have to roll up your sleeves, dig in and throw out!

This can seem like a mighty large and daunting task, but have no fear! Tackle your clutter problem one step at a time, just as you would with any goal. This project might not be something you can finish in one hour, one day or one week, so be sure to sit down and plan out your time wisely. You don’t want to be knee deep in disaster with a ticking clock. So start small, focus on only your bookshelf or your desk and then save other areas for another time.

If there’s a mountain of books and paper that has piled up somewhere and ready to topple over, that may be your starting point. Getting the large, intrusive stuff out of the way first, will sometimes make the rest of the task seem like a piece of cake.

Another thing that really helps with the task is making sure you have all supplies needed to help you clean out your clutter. I like to grab trash bags and go around collecting and dumping all of my major trash first. This includes old envelopes and papers that I have scribbled on. I also like to have a container of wet naps and dusters so I can clean any surfaces I come across along the way. It’s amazing how fast a cluttered space can collect dirt and dust!

Remember your goals! Just because Betty is calling about the bake sale, doesn’t mean you need to drop what you’re doing to answer. I know from personal experience that once my attention is distracted, it’ll take me a while to refocus and return to the “zone”. Turn on some upbeat music to help keep you energized and focused on what you’re doing.

The main ingredient to conquering clutter is organizing it. Storage isn’t the only issue a clutter bug has to worry about, but also display. Most clutter bugs like the idea of being surrounding by their treasures and possessions, so the question is – how do you display all of these things without making the place look messy? There are many creative ways to decorate with your trinkets, like adding in extra shelves, shadow boxes, or highlighting nooks and crannies. Place like items together in groups. Decorative boxes are a wonderful way to store possessions, and they make it easy rotate your trinkets throughout the year.

Other ways you can organize your clutter is by setting up sections for everything. Set aside an area in your closet for your work outfits, so you spend less time digging through piles of clothes. Set up your coffee section by having all of your coffee needs in one area. Keeping like items together will help save you time when looking for them. It also gives various items a place.

Limited space can cause problems for a clutter bug. Here are some ideas of where you can put things:
• added shelving and enclosed furniture
• back to back furniture
• tops of furniture for displaying collections
• install ceiling hooks for hanging
• look for hollow spaces to store things like under the bed or behind sofas

Or just be creative! I like to store things in decorative suitcases – they double as a great bedside table too!

As a final note, when looking for a place to put your clutter, be sure that it’s easy for you to access, or else things will never be put back.

Tags: closet, clutter control, creative, organize, organizing

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I absolutely LOVE the fall and winter; It starts off with the spooky season of Halloween. Then it blends into the smelly, tasty, good Thanksgiving holiday, stuffing us full before sending us into a wintertime gift-giving frenzy until we’re finally ringing in another New Year!

We have a lot to look forward to this season, as Halloween was dressed up in antique whites and black glitter (at least around here!). My heart went a flutter when I saw the regal purple and black Halloween decorations at Target but now I’m all about the airy and light baubles that will be gracing chic homes this winter.

We started off this year with hope, fear, and change. And now we’re ending it “Expressing Our Dreams” (which, by the way, was this year’s theme at the Christmas World show).

We’ve seen a retro trend from the 60’s popping up in designs all year and now we’re beginning to see a nod to the 70′s with disco inspired glitz and glam; Shiny trinkets, glass and crystal, coupled with an organic harmony. Trend colors are keeping with the white we’ve seen, but now it’s textured and patterned with sea-foam green and grays for a dreamy look, or bright, bold magenta with canary yellow and emerald green for an optimistic feeling.

When you’re decorating for the holidays, look to the New Year and the dreams and goals to which you aspire. Use these as inspiration to the feeling or look you are going for.

For me, when I look ahead, I see dreams soaring into reality, a thought resembled by glitter dusted birds, glass baubles, and white lighted twigs.

Tags: closet design, Design, organic

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Everyone has a guilty pleasure – which doesn’t seem so “guilty” to other people, but to you it’s one of those little private things that you generally hide from the rest of the world.

MySpace is a guilty pleasure of mine as well as Hollywood trends, so when I saw the feature for Famous Hangers on MySpace, I jumped at the chance to see what this is about.

Famous Hangers goes into the closets of Hollywood Stars to see what trends they wear, and how they store them. My favorite clip was with Denise Richards, as she goes through and shows us how she loves to color co-ordinate and label, and her shoes.

I absolutely loved her fabulous approach to organizing her shoes by storing them in shoe boxes, with clear pictures of the shoes pasted on the front. Genius! This is such a wonderful way to keep your favorite shoes clean, and easy to find.

Want a closet like Denise’s? We’ll teach you how to download and make your own shoe labels!

Tags: closet hangers, closets, famous hangers, organizing, shoe labels, shoes

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