Two posts about my closet in a week. I’m sorry about this. I’m not really feeling that creative lately, but I do have an overwhelming urge to organize the crap out of everything. So unfortunately that’s what you get from me this week. Sorry again.
If you are lucky and live in a utopia where there is plenty of storage, then you probably won’t find this post interesting at all. If, however, you are a normal person with the normal amount of crap that people accumulate, you might find this helpful.
We have six closets in our house. I suppose that makes us lucky. But they’re a little limiting. One closet houses our hot water heater, so it’s a write-off for storage. Another holds our coats, shopping bags, and boots. Another gives a place for our power tools and place settings and dog-related equipment. Another is the linen closet I featured on Monday, which also stores our luggage, toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towel.
I recently moved into my husband’s closet. Previously, I put all my girl clothes in the closet in my office, which is also where we store our camping equipment, Hallowe’en decorations, Christmas decorations, fabric, yarn, and an ever-growing collection of flattened cardboard boxes that await our eventual move back to the mainland.
Space is at a premium in this closet, and lately, the things (stacked neatly) on the floor of the closet started to interfere with the things (hung neatly) on the pole. Mostly it was the scads of empty boxes. So I had to move. Fortunately, I don’t own too many girly clothes that require hanging up, so my husband will barely notice that I’m there (mine is the stuff to the left of the white fabric shelving). Of course, his closet is where we store all our miscellaneous technical equipment: coaxial cables, pieces of computer, boxes and cases for PS3s and Wiis and whatnot. Baseball gear. Our vacuum. Miscellaneous unidentifiable items that the Pie won’t let me throw away.
To save space, I have hung my dresses on stacked trouser hangers. This means that the dresses themselves don’t hang so low in the closet that their bottoms get dusty and wrinkled dangling amidst all the other crazy things. So I simply folded them in half and draped them from the waistline on these hangers, which you can get anywhere.
In addition to keeping the hems out of harm’s way, it also takes the pressure of gravity off some of the more delicate straps and hanging loops, all of which tend to stretch and mis-shape your dresses if you leave them hanging like that for too long. Having the dresses securely folded across these hangers (which have non-slip coatings on them) also means that I won’t be searching for something else and accidentally knock a dress or two to the floor, where it will be smushed into the chaos in the bottom of the closet.
That also frees up a bunch of hanger space. And I realized that I had over a hundred of these babies that we were never going to use. I find it hard to believe that we used to have enough clothes to fill all of these things!
Ali Does It Herself 