Welcome to Spring Clean Your Life, your one-stop shop for gotta-try-those tips & bookmark-me inspiration to spruce up your kitchen and home this season—and well beyond.
Have you heard of the ladies at The Home Edit? Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, Nashville-based professional organizers with a long list of celebrity clients, are especially adept at turning headache-inducing problem areas into functional and beautiful spaces. It doesn’t hurt that this hilarious duo, working moms with addictive Instagram Stories, have so much fun along the way, making the task of organizing seem downright enjoyable—well, almost. Here, they share their favorite before and after makeovers with us.
With all of our projects, we aim to blend function and design—but the function has to come first. We spend an inordinate amount of time constructing smart and sustainable systems, and we don’t stop tweaking and arranging until we are 100 percent satisfied. We can style anything to be pretty, but unless there’s a smart system to back it up, it won’t stay that way.
Medicine and first aid are intended to serve a purpose, not be easy on the eyes. But if you add some divided turntables, and lose the boxes, you can have it both ways.
Before starting any project, we immediately scan the space for stylish accents we can incorporate into the organization. Since we were designating this pantry for baking and breakfast, we thought the pitchers and cake stands would be a perfect complement.
Two words: Band-Aid caddy. Why do kids love them so much? We will never know. But with this client's THREE kids (someone get this family a medal!), and 15 types of Band-Aids, having everything neatly organized in a labeled bin makes life a little easier.
When we walked into this pantry, we immediately noticed the shelf height. In order to maximize the footprint, we knew we had to use stackable storage bins. We were also able to use a Crazy Susan (a Lazy Susan with a 16-inch diameter!) for the first time, and it provided endless laughs throughout the project.
A brand new house means a completely blank slate—and this client's blank slate was LARGE. We added baskets across the shelves to hold the food categories and kitchen supplies, and glass canisters for the (one million) staple items.
A blank slate closet is just as fun as a blank slate pantry. The sky (ceiling?) is the limit and we like to find ways to optimize every square inch. We lined the top shelves with baskets, hung purses on handbag hooks, added stackable shoeboxes, and swapped out all of the hangers for the velvet variety.
Does your home have a clutter zone? Let us know how you've managed the chaos in the comments.
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Written by: thehomeedit
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12 Comments
I think it would be much more helpful to have before/after shots at the same angle with the same lighting so you can really see the difference in the space, not just two completely different photos.
I'm also a definite non-fan of removing all packaging for things with lot/batch/expirations. I don't think it looks much better, and that's information I like to have on hand in case of a reaction or recall.
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