Elsie’s Storage Room Makeover

Hello hello! I am so excited because today I FINALLY get to reveal my storage room makeover … and this is not just an ordinary storage room. It’s pretty “extra” in all the best ways.

Especially my new best friend (a freezer that is making all my dreams come true). And I definitely went a little overboard making the room aesthetically pleasing—but hey, this storage room is honestly life changing. I feel like a real adult finally!

We’re partnering with The Home Depot for this post. They’re our go-to for so many projects, supplies, appliances, fixtures—you name it. (Oh yes, and PLANTS, haha). When starting to plan this room out, we knew it’d be perfect to partner on since they have everything we needed for the space.  

Related: Everything You Need to Organize Your Home (Room by Room)

Here’s a before and after view. This storage closet is a long hallway closet in the the back of what used to be our garage. Since we no longer have a garage, we wanted to use this room to store all our extra off-season stuff (and then some!).

There is a separate large closet in our basement for tools (larger ones like saws) as well.

To be fair, I didn’t take a before photo with all our STUFF, but it was piled so high in here that you couldn’t even walk! You can use your imagination.

And, here’s a view from the opposite direction. Adding these shelves was the biggest game-changer so we can organize all our decorations, seasonal stuff, party stuff, toddler clothes we are saving for the next kid, etc. I am SO IN LOVE with these shelves.

I used these Sterilite 70 QT. Ultra Storage Boxes to fill the shelves. They are great for organizing all our random things—I love that I can still see the stuff inside them.

On IG Stories earlier this summer, I took a vote on whether we should paint the door a light or dark color. So many people voted dark, but then someone pointed out to me that if we did white you can see spiders and I was SOLD.

I love the white because it’s just a fresh, clean slate. This room is 90% functional choices, but the white paint is my 10% just-because-it-makes-me-happy. And I’m definitely more motivated to clean and organize spaces that are visually pleasing … that’s normal, right?

Let’s talk about storage! I will forever be tweaking these storage boxes because I don’t want to keep stuff we aren’t going to use. At this point, since we’ve lived in our home three years, I am donating everything we haven’t used and aren’t planning to use this coming year.

So everything in this room is stuff we love and are going to use. It’s really important to me that we’re not just keeping stuff for the sake of keeping it. 

I’m really grateful to have a place to store stuff for upcoming projects now since I think you’ve all seen my office (it sometimes becomes the place we throw stuff when we clean—yikes). Intentional storage is so much better.

Holiday stuff is a BIG category for me. It’s the most grandma thing about me, I think. I love seasonal decor. I’m so excited to have a place to store it all together now so that when the next season rolls around I will actually know where it all is!

On this wall, we added a Dimensions white pegboard. This is one of my go-to ideas for storage because I love how you can customize it!

Let’s obsess about the freezer, shall we? It’s the Frigidaire Frost Freeze Upright Freezer. I am so so so excited about this! It’s a complete game-changer for our home.

So I love our fridge, but the freezer part of it is extremely small. For that reason, we always knew we wanted to add a deep freezer to our basement storage room.

I always envisioned the kind of chest deep freezer that we had growing up, but my mom suggested that we do an upright freezer because it’s much easier to keep organized and see everything you have. Best advice EVER—thank you, mom.

The freezer is helpful for so many things:
-Storing overflow for what can’t fit in our freezer in our kitchen.
-Easy junk food meals for weekends and cheat nights (Jeremy and I are trying to swear off ordering so much delivery food and this will be extremely helpful).
-Keeping our fridge healthy. We like to eat mainly healthy foods, but then splurge for weekends and special occasions. It’s the most annoying thing ever to me when there’s a tube of cookie dough or a pint of ice cream staring me in the face when I’m trying to be healthy.
-Keeping stocked up on easy meals. We have been making so much vegetable soup lately and I’m so happy I can hoard my frozen veggies. We also like to keep options for quick meals on hand for Nova that are healthy (she loves cauliflower fried rice just as much as regular fried rice and we all love steamed broccoli).
-Keeping ingredients like pie crust on hand so we can make holiday memories.
-Being able to stock up on things we always use (like stock UP) when there’s a good sale.

Forgive me if you think it’s silly that I just listed out all the things I’m going to use my freezer for,  but it’s such a big practical upgrade for us. We’re so excited!

Thanks to The Home Depot for sponsoring this post! And thank you so much for reading! Collin and I had so much fun working on this project. It’s definitely one of those SUPER functional spaces that will pay off for years and years to come! xx – Elsie