How to Organize Your House with No Money:
Every home needs some sort of organization system, if only so you can find what you need when you need it. It doesn’t matter how big or small your home is – and often, the smaller the space, the more important good storage solutions become. But whether you’re a fashionista on the hunt for closet organization, a new homeowner seeking small pantry organization ideas, a new parent looking for affordable storage ideas, or a student who needs dorm or small apartment organization, the best solution I’ve found is the same: there’s nothing more satisfying than budget organizing with baskets.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I adore baskets. Baskets were a part of my life before I became a mom, but in retrospect, I think my pre-parenthood self was only scratching the surface of their full potential.
While I love an organized home, getting mine to that state is a constant, ongoing work-in-progress. Enter baskets. Baskets are honestly one of the most versatile organizing products for home that I’ve ever used. For those of you who haven’t fully unlocked their secrets yet, here are a few of mine:
Organizing with Baskets: Inexpensive Home Organization Ideas
1. Basket organization hacks for parents: Contain, sort, and separate.
- Our downstairs changing table is surrounded by an assortment of baskets: clean diapers, wipes/creams/spare diaper covers, spare play-clothes, clothes half-worn and not yet ready for the laundry, dirty clothes that need washing, socks, and tights.
- My sewing area has baskets for mending supplies and projects, crafting supplies and projects, and sewing projects-in-progress.
- My guest bathroom (a.k.a. our laundry room) has baskets to hold facecloths and an assortment of travel-sized toiletries.
- The kids’ bath has a toilet-top basket to corral reading materials and spare undies, and a metal one on the floor next to the tub to keep their various shampoos, conditioners, and body washes handy yet contained.
- In the master bath, which doesn’t have a medicine cabinet or linen closet, countertop baskets keep toiletry supplies nearby and neat. Near the toilet, another holds spare toilet paper.
2. Best organizing products for home: hide and store.
- Since I often find myself doing paperwork at the kitchen table, I like to keep a stash of office supplies (pens, stapler, letter-opener) at my fingertips. But I don’t like them to disappear into the hands (and from there, the secret hiding places) of my curious offspring. I’ve found a deep-sided basket that keeps my stash accessible to me, but out of the sight (and minds) of my kiddos.
- I love to crochet, but don’t particularly enjoy untangling yarn after my dear daughters have gotten into it. As a result, I’ve hidden various caches of yarn, squirrel-like, in baskets scattered around our living room and my craft area (which doubles as the girls’ basement play space).
- Our kitchen hutch, which is only steps from the kitchen table and the first-floor bath, used to keep baskets of clean baby bibs and post-meal washcloths at our fingertips. As our girls grew, the basket of bibs morphed into a container for crayons and colored pencils.
3. Organizing on a budget: keep things close at hand.
- My car has baskets in the backseat to keep the girls’ toys contained but within reach. Others keep spare hats/sunglasses/shoes and blankets/coats handy. On road trips, the front seat holds a basket with snack items and extra water bottles; on a day-to-day around-town basis, a basket serves as a catchall for stuff I need to return and small items I’ve purchased.
- A small handled basket, hung from a magnetized hook on the back of our kitchen door, holds outgoing mail in the winter, and sunblock and bug repellent in summer.
- Near the kitchen door, small mesh baskets hold things we need when heading out in the morning (hair ties, socks, sunglasses, hats/gloves).
4. More basket organization ideas: an extra hand or two.
- When I’m cleaning house or picking up, I often use a large basket to collect items that belong in another room, or on a different floor. This saves me trips up and down the stairs, and helps me bring more stuff in one trip than if I had to carry it in my hands.
- As noted above, I also use baskets for getting little things in and out of the car around a day of errands: those empty printer cartridges to recycle, the store flyer with coupons I plan to use, my refilled water bottle, etc.
- My favorite mom basket of all time is the Outdoor Basket we use for a morning out playing in the front yard, an afternoon on the back deck by our inflatable pool, or a walk to our neighborhood park.
- Baskets are also perfect for things you want to keep at hand. My mama does a lot of summer entertaining by her pool, so keeps two baskets handy with utensils/napkins and plastic wine glasses.
Room-by-Room Affordable Storage Ideas with Baskets:
Closet organization 101: Cheap closet organization ideas
Inexpensive baskets are by far the cheapest way to organize closet space. While you can use woven wooden or wicker baskets on closet shelves, I prefer fabric, plastic, seagrass, or wire baskets because they’re less likely to scratch shelf surfaces.
Although I’ve never seen these in thrift stores – meaning I always have to buy them new – I also highly recommend hanging-under-shelf baskets. These wire baskets are a SUPER way to take advantage of otherwise-wasted space to store small and/or flat items.
I personally use matching dollar-store plastic baskets in my own closet to store my cycling clothes, with an undershelf hanging wire basket to store my bandanas and exercise socks. A second hanging basket holds extra Ace bandages and similar items.
And if you’re looking for cheap closet storage organization ideas, you can’t beat pairing baskets with adjustable-shelf storage towers. This has long been one of my fave inexpensive home organization ideas; the tall skinny bookcase I installed in my closet has several more dollar-store baskets that hold my scarves, and others contain socks.
Baskets are especially great for keeping kids’ closets tidy and organized. They can hold books, toys, linens, socks, underwear, accessories, and items your little ones don’t use every day.
Both my kiddos’s rooms are well-stocked with baskets holding everything under the sun. Essie loves baskets for storing art supplies in her bedroom “art studio.” Kimmie stores everything from old school papers and magazines to socks and underwear in assorted baskets.
Small pantry organization ideas with baskets
Whether your pantry is a walk-in closet or a cupboard, many of the cheap closet organization ideas I mentioned above using baskets will also work well for pantry spaces. Using baskets for small pantry organization is a no-brainer when it comes to things like granola bars, envelopes of soup or drink mixes, bags of chips, pet supplies, and other miscellaneous things that tend to collect in pantry storage areas.
But baskets can work just as well on vertical surfaces as they can on horizontal ones. There are tons of hanging door baskets that can maximize space inside cupboards, and full-length door basket systems designed to go inside closet doors.
To be fair, I haven’t ever run across either of these options in a thrift store. But both are widely available online, are less costly than (say) a custom closet system, and well worth the minimal investment.
If you’re handy with a cordless screwdriver and drywall anchors, another option is installing small metal baskets in otherwise wasted space just inside pantry cupboards and closets, as I did in our back hall closet. (These baskets DID come from a thrift store, but even new they are inexpensive to buy.)
Using baskets for bathroom and small apartment organization
A lot of the basket organization ideas that work in closets and pantries are also well-suited to bathrooms, and are especially perfect for small apartment organization. Every apartment I ever lived in was a storage disaster. Either there wasn’t enough storage space in the right places (e.g., no linen closet or storage anywhere near the bathroom), or the storage was so poorly configured that it was almost unusable.
Enter organizing with baskets. A freestanding set of adjustable shelves can stand in for a kitchen pantry, linen closet, or bathroom cupboards. And with a series of baskets to keep everything contained and organized, your efforts to organize with baskets can be downright stylish.
Take this example that my awesome sister-in-law Alicia styled in the storageless bathroom of the tiny apartment she and my brother Evan shared when they were first married:
As Alicia expertly demonstrated in this case, baskets don’t have to be all matchy-matchy. This example of organizing with baskets in their small bathroom worked so well as a linen-closet-out-in-the-open precisely because each basket was unique.
Tips & Tricks for Stocking Up on Baskets as Cheap Storage Solutions
You can always splurge on matching baskets if you really need a certain size or color for a particular space (and even then, I recommend off-price locations like TJMaxx or HomeGoods over Pottery Barn, if you’re doing this on a budget).
On the other hand, I’ve acquired most of mine at yard sales and thrift stores, where you can easily find them for as much as $5 or as little as 50 cents. (Just be sure to look them over carefully before you buy, to confirm they’re structurally sound.) You can also find great sales on handled baskets in the weeks after Easter, and on baskets for shelves (and storage containers more generally) in January.
Happy Basketing!
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