Revamping My Closet Space

After I returned from Boxing Day shopping, stacked my purchases in one corner of my room, and surveyed my available closet and drawer space, I realized I had no room for all of the cool new stuff I'd got. Unless I seriously rethought my clothing storage solutions, I was going to end up with a closet and dresser that explode clothes all over me...a bit like the scene in Shopaholic Takes Manhattan where the heroine misuses vacuum seal storage bags.

I let my Boxing Day gear sit in a pile on the floor for as long as I could tolerate before I thought about my options:

1. Buy a new dresser and move one of the desks in my room to another part of the house. Possible cost: $100-200, plus a full day devoted to going to Ikea, putting together the dresser, moving the desk, and filling the dresser with clothes.
2. Buy one of those clear plastic storage dresser units on castor wheels and put it in the space under my desk. Possible cost: $50.
3. Move around my books so that a couple of shelves on my bookcase are empty, and then take clothes out of my dresser and put them on the empty bookcase shelves. Possible cost: $0-15, plus a full day devoted to moving books and bookcase shelves, shuffling clothes around.

Thinking of my Visa bill for the next month with a pang, I chose the cheapest most hassle-free option, #3. As it turned out, the project quickly snowballed. I moved the clothes out of the bottom two drawers in my dresser: thick sweaters I don't wear unless it's below -10 degrees Celsius outside, and old clothes I no longer wear out and become my lounge-around clothes because they're too good to throw away. Seeing the stacks of clothes on my bed made me realize how tacky they might look just piled up on the shelves, and how it might be hard to keep them organized and accessible. I took a detour to the dollar stores near my house and picked up several white plastic storage bins which became makeshift drawers on the bookcase.

This is what my bookcase/dresser looks like now:



I'm pretty proud of this storage solution if I do say so myself. I don't feel too bad about putting my clothes in plastic bins because the contents of these bins are clothes I rarely wear but don't want to throw out or give away. Right behind the polar bear and the penguin are a box full of clothing care items (spare buttons/sequins/thread, a sweater shaver, pins, etc.) and a lint brush. Sheer genius.

After I finished, I had an extra storage basket left over, which I used to toss scarves and gloves into on the top shelf of my closet:



As I said, the project snowballed. It wasn't enough to make room in my dresser for more clothes. I assessed my closet and thought my clothes looked a bit crowded inside, and the closet floor was absolutely cluttered with purses and shoe boxes. I folded up some items and instantly my jackets and coats looked like they had room to breathe:



My issue with purses is they're all different sizes and shapes and I never know quite how to store them because they take up so much room. In the past I sorted them into small vs. medium handbags and just put them in big paper shopping bags and left the large ones out, but then the large ones took up a ton of room on my closet floor, and all the handbags in the shopping bags sank into a mess at the bottom. This time around, I put all of them in a huge laundry basket under my desk. I also stacked some of my shoes in the empty space right next to laundry basket, which freed up more closet space:



I'm pretty happy with my room configuration now and glad that I now have a more functional, organized clothing storage solution. Phew. Now maybe I can work on filling up some of the space I made when I go to New York next month.