I believe I've been promising to post a tour of our small walk-in closet for about a year now, and look - it's finally here! I know exactly why it has taken me so long to actually take photos and put this post together. My closet just isn't very... instagram-mable, if you will. Not that it's messy, or disorganized; but being the main closet in our apartment (the second one being a small coat closet in the entryway), it houses a lot of miscellaneous stuff. It's not just prettily color-coordinated racks of clothing - there's our luggage and various bags and backpacks, spare bed linens, shoes, sports equipment, studio lights... So while you wouldn't find photos of our closet in a home decorating magazine, it's ours, it's functional, and it's real. I hope you'll enjoy!
These two photos show views of our closet taken from slightly different angles in our bedroom. The closet itself is a rectangular shape, with clothing rods set in an L-shape along two walls and a simple shelf above that, and a simple shelving unit in the corner. There are two rows of clothing rods along the longer wall (looking straight on from the door, somewhat visible in the left photo), but we only use the upper one as we don't have that many clothes and need that space for storing larger items like suitcases and a tennis racquet bag.
Starting clockwise on the left when you enter our closet, there's space for clothes that extends all the way to the floor so that we've been able to hang our longer pieces there: winter coats, suits, my dresses and long sweaters and cardigans. On the shelf above, we keep spare bedding for our bed and some bags.
In the photo below, I've roughly shown how I try to stick to the KonMari way of hanging longer and heavier pieces on the left and shorter and lighter items on the right. I have to say though that since I wear all my clothes, it doesn't stay very neat all the time - I will often get dresses mixed in with the sweaters and so on. As you can see, the hangers are quite spaced apart, so there's plenty of room to shift things around when planning outfits. I keep my plushy bath robe on the very right so I can easily grab it when needed.
On that same side of the closet under my clothes, we keep our shoes that are currently not in use (off-season and sports shoes). I have most of mine in boxes for neater storage (yes, they're not as easy to see but in my experiences, shoes can get very dusty in storage), and the black Garnier bag is full of my beauty empties, waiting for another quaterly post :)
Moving on to the longer wall that's facing the door, I keep my clothes (well, mostly) on the left and my husband's clothes on the right. On the very back of the rod that's the most difficult to access, I keep our snowboarding pants and jackets, since we only need these a couple times a year at most. Moving to the right, I hang my skirts (off-season towards the back, current season more in the front), shorter sweaters and cardis and lastly shirts and blouses.
Mr's side follows more or less the same pattern in reverse: dress and casual shirts, sweaters and hoodies, pants on the very right. My husband doesn't actually need clothes stored in our closet all that often (we keeps his everyday clothing in a chest of drawers next to mine, shown here), but I decided to give his stuff a 'prime spot' in our closet since he has trouble finding things otherwise (and I usually get accused of 'hiding it on purpose' ;). We keep more guest bed linens and more bags on the long shelf above the clothing rod.
There's a small shelving unit in the right corner of our closet, which I use to store some random but necessary things. The wicker basket on the uppermost shelf houses my spare tights and stockings as well as sentimental items, and the shelf beneath has all of my hand bags and purses with the exception of the one that's currently being used.
The shelf below that is empty - it used to be full of the rest of my purse collection that I have since purged, then I used it to collect all of Christmas gifts I bought for our family in November/ December of last year, and now I don't have a specific need for it. I quite enjoy having that empty shelf - it's like the empty drawer in my dresser, full of exciting possibilites :D The bottom shelf has another basket, this time filled with more sports equipment (mostly rock climbing gear). I've had both baskets in this shelving unit for a long time and used to keep them in other parts of the apartment, but they fit perfectly here and I much prefer having the chaos of smaller items contained inside as opposed to just stacked on the shelf in plain view.
Lastly, on the back of the closet door, I've attached a 3M hook and hung my scarf hanger with the ones that I use the most often (I keep just a few more in my chest of drawers in the bedroom). The little fabric sachet has a scented bar of soap inside that helps to keep our closet smelling fresh and clean.
That's it! I'm not sure how helpful this actually was, but I quite enjoy watching tours of people's closets and browsing photos of closet organization. One thing I find frustrating about most of the ones that I manage to find (YouTube and/or blogs) is that most closets shown are rather large, and being just one of multiple closets within a house, are only used for storing clothes - and I find clothing storage easy enough, it's the random stuff that's difficult to keep organized. Anyway...
Let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for reading!
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