Organizing Your Chicago Bungalow: Reimagine Your Living Space This Year

Organizing your Chicago bungalow is no easy feat. Between 1900 and 1930, real estate developers constructed bungalows with the rapidly sprouting Chicago population in mind. Therefore, they architected a standardized design, accommodating 100,000 working-class families.

One of the benefits of their standardized approach is that bungalows oftentimes follow the same architectural rules. This means that what works for organizing one Chicago bungalow can easily work for another!

For this Chicago bungalow project, Mise En Place Home Edits broke it down into four key components.

Organizing Your Chicago Bungalow: Carve Through the Kitchen

Mise En Place started off by finishing this particular Chicago bungalow kitchen. We organized both the fridge and freezer, ensuring an optimal kitchen space.

Understanding a Galley Kitchen

As a galley-style kitchen, it features two parallel countertops met with a walking area down the middle. While this presents a slim side-by-side perspective, it offers plenty of opportunity for some of our favorite zones. Because the space can appear small, it is important to section off several “zones”. Our team created a zone for produce, one for cheese, one for lunch meat, one for dairy, and lastly, an entire drawer holding snacks for the family’s baby girl.

Meanwhile, we split the freezer into meal periods – breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert. As professional organizers, we incorporated wonderful pull-out bins with handles. This prevented items from piling up.

Food Waste is a big sticking point. Throwing away perfectly good food is throwing away perfectly good money. In fact, about 17% of global food production goes to waste; 61% of that waste is generated by households. Investing in simple organizational products saves big money in the long run, by extending the lifespan of food supply.

Organizing Your Chicago Bungalow: Mastering the Master Closet

Before the happy homeowners had a sweet baby girl, they dedicated the second bedroom to a dressing room and a closet. Now, that their family extended to three, Mise En Place Home Edits needed to move the mom into the master bedroom closet.

Study the Shelving

When organizing your Chicago bungalow’s master closet, notate which shelves are used and how. After seeing that their master closet contained plenty of unused shelving space and closet rods, we began the merger. For this matter, it was a little more straightforward, and we consumed the space roughly 50/50.

Sort Through Clothing

First things first, we went through all of the clothes. Before, the master closet contained bins labeled with different sizes for different seasons. The homeowners implemented some bins for donations with others “for sale”. This set us up to only keep the most used clothes in the closet. Our team labeled everything else, and stored it in the basement next to the laundry room.

Like most closets, this one showcased plenty of awkwardly folded clothing. After refolding the clothing, we placed them on the open shelves, but not haphazardly. Our team divided the clothes in larger groups such as sweaters, t-shirts, and pajamas for the sake of organized storage.

The pants also went into some of the shelves. Similar to the other articles of clothing, we folded and divided them into categories—athleisure, jeans, and black pants. Doing this seems precious, but creating separation makes folding and putting away laundry much easier.

Even jewelry found a home in this closet. There was an amazing amount of beautiful clothes and accessories. We dedicated the one bureau in the room to the undergarments.

Organizing Your Chicago Bungalow: Nursing the Nursery

Of course, the sweet little princess received a room of her own. Once we emptied out mom’s clothes, we moved the dresser under the window. This optimized space for the crib. In addition, we also borrowed two beautiful white leaning bookcases from the living room to create decorative book and toy storage.

Storing for Little One

While the walk-in closet is still partially shared with “mom”, the surplus extra diapers, linens, blankets and toys made seamlessly made it their home. We employed a pink hanging shoe rack for storage. And we folded the entire Disney wardrobe. Luckily, the dresser came pre-outfitted with dividers already. Major time-saver!

Finally, our team guided the glider and ottoman from the living space to the nursery. Tucking away a few books and stuffed animals created a comfy reading nook.

Organizing Your Chicago Bungalow: Living for the Moment, Not the Closet

Though reorganizing the living room closet only took 30 minutes, it built up years of aggravation. Like the master closet, the living room closet reflected untapped potential and overstuffed items.

When organizing your Chicago bungalow’s living room closet, swap out the household items and appliances that do not need to be there. In this case, we saw a vacuum cleaner and a step stool that ate away too much space. Replacing these items with tall felt storage bins, courtesy of our friends at Target, we stored away larger toys, instead of leaving them on the floor. After just 30 minutes, Mise En Place Home Edits knocked out a quick cleanup.

Summary

Organizing your Chicago bungalow mandates a lot of time and energy when looked at holistically. Instead, focusing on one section at a time allows you to take a big project and chop it down piece by piece.

But if you want some help along the way, contact the judgment-free, Chicago organizational experts at Mise En Place Home Edits!