Chapter 4: Finding New Homes

Here’s a fun fact for you… it just so happens that Organization Week and our Spare Bedroom novel intersect in such a way that we can do BOTH at once! Now that’s what I call efficient. 🙂

If you remember, we’ve been on a quest to transform our former Spare Room closet into the snazziest office space on the block. If this means nothing to you, you might want to consider reading Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 before continuing on with this post. Last we left it at some closet planning…

But do you remember what the ramifications of taking everything out of said closet are? Uh, yeah… this:

While this makeover is exciting and all, we can’t get around the fact that most of what previously lived in the main part of the closet (the top shelves and shoe shelves will remain in tact) now needs another home.

For the most part, that is a lot of clothes and all of the Rubbermaid bins that hold our tools and gift wrapping supplies (you can see how we organized all of that here). First let me show you where the two smaller drawer sets containing our tools ended up. We simply did some shifting around in the downstairs hall closet and stuck them in there.

The gift wrap is still a puzzle- I have yet to figure out where that will live. So for now, it’s just another thing taking up space in the Spare Room until we come up with a plan. Now for the clothes. The clothes were a big concern because we had already maxxed out our own closet space (hence the spill over into the Spare). At least, so we thought. After some brainstorming and assessing our current closet situation, we came up with this plan:

1. We needed to get rid of some stuff.
2. We needed to add another hanging rod.

If you walk into our closet (I use that term loosely- really, you take one step and you’re “in”) and turn left, you’ll see our current rod, a large step up, and a platform that we have been using to store big plastic containers of things. Above you are two (very handy!) shelves that run the length of the closet.

The plan was to clear the plastic bins out from the platform and install a second rod going the opposite way than the first. Are you lost yet? Maybe this shot of the end result will help…

It is definitely shorter than the main rod, but it gives us just enough space to store the clothes from the Spare closet. Plus, we thought that if we played our cards right, we might also be able to fit a few plastic bins back in there too. To make the switch, I picked up an extra heavy duty rod extendable from Lowes and just followed the instructions to hang it up securely in the closet.

Truthfully, I wasn’t super concerned with making sure it was perfectly level and straight- all it had to do was hold some clothes and no one would really be seeing it on a day to day basis. One thing I liked about this product is that it is easily removable- one end of the hanging system is closed to keep the rod in place and the other has an opening at the top so the rod can be lifted and taken down.

After all was said and done, the new (but still empty) rod looked like this:

From there, we loaded all of the clothes in after getting rid of as much as we could. And voila! A new home for the wardrobe!

Bonus points for being able to fit a couple of our big plastic bins back there, squished next to the clothes.

Now our Spare closet is (almost) free and clear so that we can move forward with the next step… hiding those unsightly shelves! Stay tuned for Chapter 5! 🙂