Organizing a master closet: Part 1. Why yes, that does mean there will be more to this story, but not immediately. Right now the closet in our master bedroom looks completely different than it will in the photos I’m showing you today. Right now our whole bedroom is a disaster renovation zone hidden by dirty laundry. Right now I’m still working on getting the muscle and motivation to finish a project I started a few weeks ago. But right now let’s forget all of that and look at where we started a long time ago, okay?
Now, because of that lovely ramble I preceded with, let me tell you that I don’t have really good pictures of how our room looked like before we started doing any work.
I was able to find this blurry cell phone photo that sort of shows the layout…
Let me describe the room to you:
- The farthest room on the right down our hallway, at the North West corner of the house
- Window on the North wall
- Bathroom attached to the East wall
- Main doorway on the South wall, with the closet and our wedding shelf
- Walls in the original dark grey/taupe as when we moved in
- We did paint the West wall red
Okay, so in the photo, our bed was on the red wall, and our dressers were on the East wall opposite the bed.
So the closet is on the left side there, and it sticks out about 1′ into the room. There was one rod across the length of the closet, a shelf above that, and I had some clear storage drawers on the bottom.
Above the shelf there were a few feet of wasted space, and I really wanted to get a second rod in to add storage. We purchased a closet organizer and took everything out. I even had a shoe rack in there before, but it was hidden behind the wall.
I had to include this blurry photo to show you how the Husband works around here. Notice he is cutting wood in the middle of our living room with a circular saw RIGHT ABOVE his foot (that doesn’t even have a shoe on it!). Ya, not to mention he also pushed my DIY wedding vases aside to do it… (which establishes the timeline for this story around the spring 2014).
Anyways, he cut little notches out of the trim in the closet so that the closet organizer could fit in tight along the back wall.
Once we had the organizer in place, I stacked all my plastic drawers along the bottom, and we had space at the top for more stuff. The organizer came with 3 half rods, but we just moved the original full rod to the top (above the shelves) and saved the 2 small rods for something else. Notice how you can see my shoe rack now?
We’ve since moved the bed to the West wall, using the window as the headboard. I purchased a large dark wardrobe for the Husband and pretty much took over the closet. We each also had our own 3-drawer Ikea Malm dressers, and I had another wardrobe in the space as well (you can see the top in the photo above).
Then I went ahead and got rid of a bunch of clothes. I still have a ridiculous amount BUT I was able to get rid of one dresser for myself. Which is why the wardrobe top is sitting on the Ikea dresser, because the actual bottom dresser for the wardrobe was about 1/2″ too wide to fit in this space (and yes, I even tried to remove the trim on the wall to make it fit).
I like to keep all my sweaters + dress shirts hung in the wardrobe, and I didn’t actually purge a lot of these items at the time (since it was still summer and hot). But, as I discuss in my Monthly Updates, I have been slowly trying to get rid of stuff every month.
Because I essentially went from having 6 drawers to 3, I did have to combine some of the items. (But it was okay because I had fewer things!). I also fold my shirts upwards (and have been doing it for years) and I find it really helps organize everything.
So back to the closet! (Does this photo help visualize the space better?). I bought a couple of clear bins from Ikea to hold my belts and purses at the top, and a red Lekman bin which has all my work out clothes (originally in one of my drawers). Notice how it looks much emptier since I purged my stuff? I also sold my shoe rack and got rid of a lot of shoes, so the ones I kept just hang out on the floor.
Looking at how the closet was before and getting + installing a closet organizer really changed the space. It served us well for over a year, but ever since I started wanting to live a more minimalist lifestyle, I’ve started wondering how to make the closet, and our clothes storage work more efficiently.
It’s kind of annoying to have so many dressers take up floor space in our bedroom, when our closet has so much wasted space just waiting to be filled up!
So that’s why this is called Organizing a Master Closet: Part 1. Because, this story isn’t over yet… and I’d love for you to visit me again in the future and see how it turns out :)
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