Last summer, a friend of mine, Kenzee, was telling me about the issue that is her Home Office / Guest Room / Room where everything is shoved when someone comes over. She wanted to know if I could help her out. (Obviously, yes.) But first, I had to promise not to judge her. And I was like… Ma’am. When I go to someone’s home and they have a room that needs to be organized, I don’t judge. I get excited. That’s like handing me the keys to The Container Store and telling me to go wild.

The room was filled with toys and laundry that needed to be sorted (mostly clothing that was too little for kiddo #1 and too big for kiddo #2). Kenzee was cycling toys for her kiddos, so 75% of the toys lived in this room, while the remaining toys lived in the living room, where the kids spent most of their time playing. Unfortunately there wasn’t much organization to the toys other than one went away and another would go out.

The very first thing we did was sit down and sort through all of the clothes and toys. We then sorted out the closet, which had been a holding place for several boxes of things they had moved in with, and hadn’t opened since. Finally we attacked the desk, sorted everything, and discussed how she would like to use the room. When I left that day, we had an empty closet, and mostly clean floors.

To start, Kenzee needed furniture. The desk she was using was left behind by the previous owners but was unfortunately much too large for the space. The loveseat was used as a guest bed if a family member or friend needed to spend the night, and no, it was not a fold out couch. For the room to function as a Home Office & Guest Room, it needed an appropriately sized desk and an actual bed. Fortunately, through some internet help I was able to source a desk, daybed, and a mattress.

The closet also needed a little elfa so that Kenzee could store the out of rotation toys, crafts, and guest sheets. We were able to take advantage of a back to school sale at The Container Store, as well as get a deal on the TCS “our boxes” for reasonably priced see-through storage. We put together two bins to store her kiddos school memories, which could easily be stored in the closet as well. I used my Cricut to create pretty labels for both sets of bins.

Kenzee still wanted to use the room to fold laundry, as her laundry room doesn’t have space for that. We were able to make space for the laundry bins in the closet, and also space to fold, as I had an extraneous adjustable height folding table that could easily slide under the guest bed when not in use. A few more pieces we were able to find from a BNSN group, and the room really came together!

This was a really fun project! It only took three days in the end, but it had a huge impact (and has stayed this way for the last 8 months!). Now this cute mama has a calming place to work from home, an actual bed for overnight guests, a place to do crafts, fold laundry, and maybe even a quiet place to sneak in a nap 😉