Corraling the Water Bottles and Travel Mugs

One of the challenges that I feel like I face in my house is a place to properly store things. Sure, I can usually find a corner, a basket, a shelf to tuck things away on, but it doesn't always feel very organized to me.

One of the items that have been a challenge to store are our reusable water bottles and insulated travel mugs. Between the ones that we have purchased overtime - with filters/with chilled cores/insulated/fits the bike cup holder/for coffee and the ones that we have gotten through different events - summer reading club/sports/store events/vacation, we have more than our fair share of reusable water bottles. On any given day, several will be occupying the dish strainer in our sink but several need to be stored. The real challenge has always been the varying heights and some of them have straws - so even if I had cupboard space, they likely would be too tall for a typical shelf.

We have what is supposed to be a coat closet at the end of our hallway near our garage door. Because of a feeling of lack of storage space and a desire to have some semblance of order, it has become more of a storage closet. It is where we keep our vacuum, we have two hanging shoe organizers, there is a shelf unit that holds our winter gear, my spring form pans, a roasting pan, my cookie cutters and up until a few weeks ago our water bottles.

Their perch on the top shelf always felt like it was one bump away from having several water bottles come clattering down to the floor.

Then, as I was wondering the web, as I so often do, I randomly came upon the idea of using an over the door shoe organizer to corral water bottles. I loved it. So, the next time that we were at Target, I picked up this inexpensive over the door shoe organizer and set out to organize my water bottles and travel mugs.

My hall closets and pantry all have bi-fold doors, so they weren't options for me for hanging it, so I settled on the back of the laundry room door. It keeps them out of the way, but still readily accessible, just a few steps from the kitchen.

I really am pleased to be able to store 24 water bottles and travel mugs out of the way. The crazy thing is, I still have 4 or 5 in my kitchen - the one I take each day to the gym, one for each of the kids to take to their near daily sports practices or games and summer camp, the one that I take coffee to work in each day and one other for those days when we have back to back sports and need more than one water per child.

In addition, now I have regained a shelf, plus some random other space where some additional mugs were tucked away, that allows me to better organize other things.

This post shared at Works for Me Wednesday.