5 Tiny Closet Hacks
We live in a two bedroom townhouse with lots of charm and very little storage space. It’s just the reality of our life. We love our house and it’s the perfect size for us, but sometimes smaller spaces take an extra ounce of creativity to make them as functional as we need them to be. After nearly three years in this house, I think we’ve found the sweet spot. 🙂 I blogged about the two “tiny house rules” we have way back in the beginning of my blogging days (you can read that post here), but today we’re going to get a little bit more specific. Closets.
Closets are great… if you have enough of them and they are a decent size. They can be frustrating too. Sometimes a closet works really well, sometimes it’s more of a hazard than anything else. We experienced that with our Spare Room closet, so we took the doors off and converted it into an office (you can see the finished product here). Because we eliminated that closet space, everything in there had to be relocated… to our bedroom closet.
And this is where today’s “Tiny Closet Hacks” come in. I actually wouldn’t consider our Master Bedroom closet tiny, by any means. However, there are two of us sharing it and we do not use any other closet in the house for clothes, so in that context, it can feel cozy at times. We’ve made it work, though, and I wanted to share with you 5 tips and tricks that make our co-closet-habitation possible. Also, our marriage is still intact after living with it for three years, so I think that’s saying something. 🙂
Hack #1: Add hooks and rods wherever possible. When we moved everything from the Spare to the Master, we knew we needed another rod. After looking at the space for awhile, we realized that we could squeeze another one in the back for my dresses and Mitch’s suits. That extra rod alone allowed us to be able to move every single thing from the Spare to the Master. Just because your closet starts with a certain amount of hooks and rods does not mean that you can’t add any more!
Hack #2: Utilize all of the nooks and crannies. You can see in the picture below that above our closet door are nails where we hang Mitch’s hats. They are out of the way and incognito, but he can still access them whenever he needs to.
Hack #3: Get creative with organization. We use crates stacked on top of each other to house all of our T-shirts. We are in Childrens, Youth, and Sports Ministry people. We have a lot of T-shirts. 🙂 This system has allowed us to fit a lot more in our closet AND frees up dresser space for other things. Sometimes, the T-shirts even get folded before we stuff them in… but not always. 😉 #realtalk
Hack #4: Be picky about hangers! A couple of years ago, we donated and threw out most of our regular hangers in exchange for a whole slew of cascading hangers. Ours came from Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but I haven’t been able to find them there more recently. Here is a link to what I’m talking about, though. Seriously, these things are life savers.
They are velvet-wrapped, so the clothes don’t fall off, have the indent on the sides to grip straps, and best of all, you can hook a whole bunch of them together so they take up the space of only one hanger on the rod, but you’re storing more than one article of clothing.
Hack #5: Group like things and double up. I have hangers in my closet with 2 and 3 similar articles of clothing on them. I try and do this with items that are open in the front and can easily be removed to get to the inner layer if necessary. This also helps me know where to look if I’m on the hunt for something specific… for example, striped sweaters!
Annnnnnnddd that makes five! Five hacks to help you eek just a little bit more function out of your closet… tiny or not. 🙂
Anyone else out there working with a smaller footprint and having to get creative? Over the years, we’ve come up with a few tricks that work for us… for example, we designed and made our bed to have storage cubbies on each side and a large storage space underneath (I still owe you the how-to post on that). Maybe I’ll do a few more posts like this one to share how we max out space and function of other areas of our house… like the bathroom? Maybe the kitchen? Hmmm… would this be of interest to you guys? Let us know! Until next time (tomorrow, where we’ve another Mitch & Leslie challenge all lined up!), have a good day!
