Corral those clothes!

Last week I shared about some of the new organizational and space-saving storage ideas we used in our camper on our summer West adventure. But I somehow overlooked one of the things that was key to keeping the kiddos’ clothes organized in the camper: our bunkhouse storage solution.

Although we have a wardrobe in the bunkhouse area, we are using that space to organize linens/towels and to hide away a laundry basket. So we needed a way to store and organize the kiddos’ clothes on the three-week trip. We already had two three-drawer Sterilite organizers that we had used in our pop-up campers, so we just had to buy one more for the third kiddo. Our plan was to put two of these drawer units on the empty fourth bunk (we removed the mattress) and the other organizer went at the end of our littlest’s bunk with a thin piece of wood underneath the drawer unit to support it. (This arrangement will only work for a few more years; as our youngest grows he’ll need more leg room!)

While I was at Walmart I found a narrow three-drawer system, which I brought home hoping it would fit perfectly next to the larger drawer unit–and it did! (Note: It was much cheaper at Walmart, but the Amazon link gives helpful info.) We ended up getting a second one, and those smaller drawers were great for organizing socks, underwear, and other small items. We used the larger drawer units for all of the rest of the clothes: shorts, shirts, pants, jackets, pjs, and swimsuits.

The only problem with this setup is that we needed a way to secure the bins in place so they wouldn’t slide around as the camper went bouncing down the road. So Jarrett created the rods you see in the pictures to hold things in place. He had some leftover wood pieces that he cut to fit the area. Both ends use a plastic furniture floor guard and the one end also has a nut and bolt that can be tighten to hold the rod in place or loosened to remove it. Jarrett also added a hook to the narrow storage organizers so that we could run a bungee cord vertically and keep the drawers in place.

For the drawer organizers next to the wardrobe, we had to run the rod horizontally between the camper wall and the wardrobe to hold both the big and narrow drawer units in place. Since the rod only covered the middle drawer, we did occasionally have the top drawer wiggle out a little bit, but not enough to be a problem. For the third drawer unit, though, we could run the rod vertically between the bunk and bunk ceiling, thereby holding all three drawers in place:

This turned out to be an inexpensive and easy solution for our trip. If you need more info about how to make these, drop us an email and we’d be happy to offer more specifics.

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