My work as a designer can get pretty messy between a growing collection of art supplies, paper, and reference materials and my small home office has been in varying states of semi-disaster all year. It finally reached a point where the chaos was seriously hampering my productivity and I decided some hard-core reorganization was in order.
I enlisted the help of organizing expert and fellow Apartment Therapy blogger, Kyle Freeman, to devise a new plan for the room. She immediately suggested removing the closet doors to open up the space which gave me pause — how would I hide all my boxes piled with junk? There was no way around it, I had to sort through a whole lot of stuff and it took hours, and hours … and hours, but the final result made it all worth it. I moved my shelf into the closet and not only does the room feel airer, but my supplies are so much easier to see and access. The closet was a small part of reconfiguring the whole room (still a work in progress), but a huge step forward.
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Great job - that obviously took a large amount of effort.
I'm curious - what percentage of stuff would you say you got rid of? Have you accessed the fabric in the upper right hand corner of the closet easily; it looks like it would all come toppling down.
I think it could also create a point of interest if you had painted the closet a cool color inside, or put some fab curtains on it.
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Are you worried about the fabric fading? That's something that occurs to me when I see fabric (or clothes) not behind doors, in drawers, etc.
Looks great! I would have added a spot to hang the fabrics... mine are all on a bar hanging with pant hangers. It's super easy to find what I'm looking for that way, it stays clean and I can organize by color.
:)
Looks good but I actually see quite a bit of wasted space. Built-in shelves extending the length of the closet would give you more storage space. It might also allow you a way to better store all the fabric or clothing stuffed up top. Because right now, it doesn't look like you have easy access to anything up there without having everything else come tumbling out!
Congrats on sifting through it all. Keep it up!
Thanks for the comments!
I got rid of a LOT, but most of it was boxes and papers that were wasting space. It all really just needed to be sorted in a way that made sense. And some things did get moved to other parts of the room.
It remains to be seen whether the fabric placement will work or not -- I don't use it as often as other things, so for now it makes sense, but if it starts to drive me crazy I'll rethink it (my new mantra). I do plan to eventually get a larger shelf that fits the closet better, but for now I re-purposed what I had.
Sarah
I am jealous. I would love to do that but not with my curious kitty. She'd be knocking it all down in a heartbeat.
Well done for sorting out your stuff but I would've kept the doors. However neatly arranged the inside of a closet is still the inside of a closet.
This is probably the voice of bitter experience, we have a wall of open shelving in the living room which I often wish we'd done differently.
It looks like the fabric is now twice as hard to find and get to....not a huge improvement.
Looks like there might be room for a hanging sweater bag? If so you could put the fabrics in the hanging sweater bag...
Well done! I would add a second shelf to the closet so you can stack even more fabrics w/o them all falling down when you yank one out. Your newly improved feng shui will probably bring in a lot more client gigs so get ready and buckle up! :)