Monthly Archives: August 2009

Creative Closets DIY

The key to creating a “creative” closet is to use your imagination and personalize the space as much as possible. People have hobbies, collections or odd tastes that could be accommodated by a creatively designed closet. Do you like to sew? Do you have a lot of camera equipment? Do you have a lot more shoes than you are willing to admit? Whatever is special about you and your storage needs should be used to create your personal creative closet.

Let’s take photography equipment, for example. This could also go for any electronic equipment, like video games, old home movies, computer parts, pretty much anything that you would like to keep stored away, safe and dust free. Your creative closet might include a cabinet system instead of a shelf system. You will probably want to be able to seal up the area where these things are kept to protect them from the massive amount of lint that is created when you take out and put clothes into a closet each day.

You can build a tall series of shelves, depending on how much storage space that you need, and then screw on a pre-fabricated cabinet door to seal it off. Don’t use a magnet closure if you are worried about it affecting your equipment. You can install a child-proof cabinet lock to keep out children if you’d like. Doors with a clear plastic or frosted glass front look really nice in a closet and allow you to see what is inside without opening the door. Use bags that are padded and seal well to protect your equipment even more.

Craft supplies are also sometimes kept in the closet. For instance, if you sew, but you don’t have a sewing room, you may need to store your sewing machine, material, patterns, and a plethora of small items like pins, threaders and thread. You can create a sewing station in your closet, much in the same fashion as the electronic system mentioned above.

Pegs can be installed or a thread rack hung to hold many spools of thread on the outside of the cabinet right where you can see it. You can attach hooks for scissors, measuring tape, elastic and other items that you use often. Inside you can have a shelf for your sewing machine and foot pedal. Use an organizer to keep track of all of those tiny items that come along with a sewing hobby. Stacks of material and scraps can be kept in crates, baskets or bins inside the cabinet.

Use your creativity to make your closet meet your special needs. To make more room for specific types of storage, you may want to compress the amount of space that your clothes take up by using specialty pants hangers, shirt hangers and skirt hangers that allow you to cascade clothing from one simple hook. Remember, this is your closet and it should fit your needs!

About the Author: Charlie Hafter is on the staff of Closet Hanger Factory, a leading online resource for shirt hangers, skirt hangers, pants hangers and dress hangers. Get all of the accessories you could need at http://www.closethangerfactory.com, which is recognized worldwide for their excellent quality hangers.

Create a Smart Closet

A well arranged closet will bring you such joy! Here are some basic tips for turning a small closet or a large one into a more usable space. Far too often we adjust our wardrobe to the closet that presented itself with the house. Conform no more! These tips are quick, easy and inexpensive.

Don’t depend solely on the bar. If you only wear suits and dresses, then a hanging bar may be just fine for you. But, most people need to keep a lot more of their belongings in the closet. Figure out which arrangement of bars and shelves best suits your needs and change it up a bit. You don’t have to get elaborate. You can move your bar up to make room for another one below. You can move it down to make room for shelves above. Divide the closet so that you have shelves on one side and bars on the other. Whatever suits your needs is what is best for you.

Utilize space that normally is ignored or goes unnoticed. If you read closet organization sites, you will notice the term “vertical space” mentioned over and over again. This is because people don’t notice just how much space they are wasting. Shelves can go up to the ceiling. Use bins and other containers to store small items.

The rule of thumb when organizing your closet is to keep the most used items right in front of your face. You can design your whole closet with this concept. Imagine and omni light, bright in the middle and fading out to the edges. The center focal point should be the first thing that you go for in the morning.

Let’s say that you shower and go straight for the closet to get dressed. You should probably have a laundry basket or bin for wet towels directly in front of you or just to the side of your closet. A hook for your robe should be easily reached from the center of your closet. Right in the middle you can install shallow drawers for underwear. Shallow is best because you can actually see what you have. Imagine if your dresser were designed like a large cabinet style tool box. Lots of shallow drawers means that things don’t get crammed to the bottom.

Next come shirts. Do you wear t-shirts? Can you fold and stack them on a shelf for easy access? Maybe put a shelf directly above your drawer. Then your hanging shirts should be right there within reach. Pants, coats, dresses, etc. should be arranged in the order that you normally put them on. Shoes do not have to be on the floor. You wear them every day. Reserve the floor, side areas and top shelves for items that are seldom used.

If you need to make better use of your hanging space after you install drawers and shelves, get specialty shirt hangers and pants hangers that take up less space. You can coordinate outfits so that you can grab them and go, while saving up to half of the space on your bar by hanging them together. Enjoy your smartly designed closet!

About the Author: Charlie Hafter is on the staff of Closet Hanger Factory, a leading online resource for shirt hangers, skirt hangers, pants hangers and dress hangers. Get all of the accessories you could need at http://www.closethangerfactory.com, which is recognized worldwide for their excellent quality hangers.

Basic Closet Organization Tips

The closet can seem like a giant project to tackle, so many people put it off until it really can’t be ignored any longer. There are a few basic rules of closet organization that you can follow. These simple steps make things easier to find, easier to organize and helps you get your closet in order.

First, rearrange your clothing so that your shortest clothes are on one side and your longer items are on the other. This usually frees up some space beneath the shorter clothes. You can add shelves for shoes or drawers underneath the shorter hanging clothes. You can use this space for just about anything.

Next, arrange your clothing in order of color. Make sure that you keep the length of the clothes approximately the same, but group together your shortest black shirts, white shirts, black pants, etc. This will make it easy to find clothes that match when you are getting dressed in the mornings.

Utilize inexpensive items such as over-the-door organizers, hooks and bins. Storage bags that can be flattened with a vacuum are very useful in keeping linens fresh while minimizing the space that they occupy. Store out of season clothes or bulky linens in empty suitcases to maximize overhead space.

Shoes usually end up in a huge pile. Even if you have a shoe organizer, it is hard to keep them all where they go. They fall off, they don’t fit, or you simply have more shoes than shoe space. Use clear boxes for dress shoes. Not only will they be protected from scuffs and damage, but they will be very easy to find. Make a tall stack of clear boxes in the front corner of your closet. You may want to put a dryer sheet in each box to keep shoes smelling fresh. If you plan on storing shoes for quite a while, put them in a plastic bag and store them in the freezer over night. This will kill any odor causing bacteria that may be living in the shoes and ensure that they are ultra-fresh the next time you want to wear them.

If you need additional space for hanging clothes, consider adding another hanging bar. You may have high enough ceilings to have a high bar and a low bar in your closet. Another option is to get an adjustable bar that hangs from your existing bar. You can hang it around your shirts and it gives you another bar just below your shortest items, not all the way across.

Another option for making more hanging space is to buy hangers that can piggy-back on each other. Specialty hangers can hold a lot of pairs of pants, ties, or group together outfits. Some shirt hangers are thin enough to hang clothing closer together, making more room than you might have imagined. Using these simple guidelines, you can make space in your closet and get it set up in an easy-to-maintain order.

About the Author: Charlie Hafter is on the staff of Closet Hanger Factory, a leading online resource for shirt hangers, skirt hangers, pants hangers and dress hangers. Get all of the accessories you could need at http://www.closethangerfactory.com, which is recognized worldwide for their excellent quality hangers.