I use plastic bus tubs/dishpans and shallow boxes, and mark the fruit with a Sharpie to tell what's what.

Camlan: you are one awesome ~ and super organized~ person! You've inspired me and I love your ideas and system!!! I'm following your system. After I read your suggestions, I ran down to the local Dollar Tree where I picked up 10 large plastic shoe boxes, ($10) which will temporarily hold my photos as I sort through them. I also bought 2 packs of (20 total) manila file folders ($2) that I'm going to cut up into dividers for each box to categorize the pics by year and then subcategories for events, holidays and whatever. I like your idea about scanning the best onto flash drives. I can store the master FD in our safe deposit box, I guess. I'd like to create DVDs with special events, holidays, vacations on them vents on them and then make copies for our two kids . . . eventually. I just went back to look at my intimidatingly huge box of photos and I'm so glad that I now have a plan of action to deal with them! Thank you for taking the time to put your ideas down for me and for many of us here who are in similar situations. I really appreciate it! Now, has anybody created their own DVD's from their scanned photos? I do want to make up some myself. I'm too frugal and too creative to have some company do it for me . . . but is it very difficult to do if you have a good photo scanner? Did you use any special program? DLM: I totally agree with you, I know many people that would love to hire Camlan to do this for them. Goldie: good luck with your own project. And, yes, definitely archival-quality albums and photo boxes. Eandhl: good idea and one I'm going to use: get rid of all copies (and similar) photos right away. Thanks! Dedtired: I'm right there with you regarding the albums. I've run out of space for more! Lynn

I saw something like this recently, and in fact posted a pic of it on a thread here--something about a closet under the stairs. Anyway, someone had built a big box that exactly fit into the closet space, just leaving room underneath for some big casters. So they could pull the whole box straight out to access the space behind, without disturbing anything inside the "closet." Theirs was more about being able to access stuff stored at the lower levels, where the angle of the stairs created space deep in the closet that would otherwise be unreachable. However, you have that step at the bottom that comes all the way out to the doorjamb, so you don't really have a place for a unit to roll in. Otherwise, I'd go with the idea to stashing the vacuum there, and out-of-season clothes in big plastic tubs that are easy to pull out. and maybe back-of-the-door storage for things that you need to put your hands on quickly in that area.

Assuming this closet is for storing clothes, here’s a rough idea of what you can do with an Ikea pax system 40”wide x 14” deep + 20”wide x 14”deep (customizable to suit your needs of course). Hopefully you have at least 14” to the right of the door frame to the wall, otherwise the cabinets will stick out a bit. That will leave 30” of space at the back to allow for hanging clothes. On the back wall you can do double rods and shelves. (unless you have a lot of dresses to hang then just do a single rod.)