Small Office Closet Organization Tips + Ideas

Sharing our finished office closet along with small office closet organization tips and ideas using inexpensive baskets and bins! [post contains affiliate links, which means we may make a small commission, at NO additional cost to you, if a purchase is made. thanks for supporting north country nest!]

Friends, we are SO close to finishing the home office. As in, we have some touch up spots to paint, a few areas of trim to caulk, two walls that need decorating and a file cabinet credenza that needs to be put together. That is IT. And with only one month left in 2018, we are determined to get this baby wrapped up before the New Year.

Today, we’re showing off the office closet in all its organizational glory.

Prior to installing the shelves, the closet became a dumping ground for all the things that I didn’t want in the second guest bedroom. I hope I’m not the only one who does this but sometimes my ‘cleaning’ is moving things from one room to another. I got a wild hair this summer and started organizing the second bedroom which resulted in loading up the office closet – the space that had a door that could be closed 🙂

I thought it might be helpful to walk through the process of getting from hot-mess-dumping-ground to the less chaotic and relatively-organized closet you see today.

I started with removing everything and sorting into piles of how I’d access once they’re up on the shelves. We had boxes of old electronic things, lots and lots of books, papers from taxes, receipts for this year’s taxes, envelopes, notebooks and anything else office-ish related.

After organizing, I went through each pile and threw anything and everything that resembled not being useful into a pile. Once I went through everything, I revisited the ‘throw away’ pile once more for a last run through.

Next up was picking out the shelving and containers. The main goal was to be as efficient and inexpensive as possible.

We had most of the brackets on hand already and the for the wood, I went with 4 x 2 unfinished boards. They were cut to 32″ and stained Minwax Special Walnut.

I found the bins at our local home improvement store, Menards, on clearance. I know I got lucky so below are a few other inexpensive options.

Once we installed the shelves, it was time to load them up!

I put the things that we didn’t use as often on the top and the most-used items (hello camera equipment!) right in front.

I created some easy labels with brown kraft paper and tied them to each handle with twine. If you’d like to download them yourself, click here.

I am still debating about adding a few half-shelves lower down on one side – that way the photography backdrops still have enough space to stand AND I’ll get a few more shelves to organize.