How To Maximize Your Closet Space
There’s a tradeoff involved with living in an older home or apartment. For everything that you gain in architectural details and character, you often give up one of the most important things in life: adequate closet space. But no bother, at least not with add-on storage solutions that look beautiful while making up the difference.
The way that the theory goes, people generations ago had fewer belongings, including clothes, that needed storage. When additional storage became an issue, freestanding wardrobes arrived to handle everything that didn’t have a home.
Today, you have a wide range of solutions to solve your problems. You can create beautiful and functional wardrobe units whether your need is for clothing storage, wall units for knick-knacks and collectibles, or almost anything that currently doesn’t have a designated space.
Here’s how to maximize the closet space in your home.
Curate Your Possessions
It’s been said time and again, but it remains an issue, so it bears repeating. One of the keys to maximizing storage is paring down what you own. That doesn’t mean tossing out things that you really love, and it definitely doesn’t mean adhering to a minimalist ideology. It only means evaluating what you own and thinning out unneeded possessions that take up precious space.
Curation by definition means to select and organize carefully. That’s what HGTV means when they recommend tossing out unnecessary clutter. When you approach your belongings in this way, you’ll probably find things that you didn’t know you still had. Many of them can stay, but perhaps others should have found a different home ages ago.
Think About a Wardrobe
Wardrobes aren’t old fashioned, even though they’ve been around a long time. They’re simply furniture that has the same function as a closet, just against a wall instead of recessed into it. This is an ideal option in homes where creating a true closet would mean taking square footage from the room on the other side of the wall, and, as Apartment Therapy says, when you don’t want to see clothes hanging in full view.
In rented apartments, modification on that scale isn’t feasible at all. And in older homes, it requires a substantial renovation. None of that is necessary when a beautiful wardrobe, large or small, can have everything that you need from drawers to hanging bars and shelves. Whatever your taste, traditional or contemporary, a design expert can find the styles and material to suit your needs.
Reorganize Existing Closets
Even modern homes don’t often use closet space effectively. The standard setup consists of a hanging bar and a shelf above it. In an older closet, you might only have a bar with no shelf, which makes the space even less efficient. But with a closet system, you can change all that.
Reach-in closet systems are workhorses where organization is concerned. As with a wardrobe, you can have almost anything that you like. There are shelves, drawers, multi-level hanging bars, shoe racks and accessories to use every square inch of even a diminutive closet to its fullest. And because The Closet Works designers use exact dimensions, your system will fit better than anything you could buy pre-fab.
Closets don’t get enough attention during the design phase of a house, and that’s especially true when your home was built decades or a century ago. The Closet Works understands the need for efficient use of space, and that’s why our designers are experts.
For more inspiration, download our ebook: Transcendental Organization. You’ll learn a few tricks of the trade, and come away with a beautifully organized home no matter how small (or nonexistent) your closets happen to be.
