Love Letter

It works in every room.

My apartment’s laundry closet is small but mighty. While it fits most laundry essentials (haphazardly), I still found myself wondering how I could maximize its storage space. I bought an IKEA over-the-door hanger to store my tabletop ironing board and a hanging hamper, but because my laundry closet doubles as my linen closet, I didn’t have a proper spot for cleaning rags, bath mats, and other miscellaneous items.

It's so functional!

Plus, it’s rust-proof!

My sheets have never looked neater.

It’s like having a catch-all dish on my wall.

In my teeny New York City apartment, figuring out how to extract every square inch of space sometimes feels like performing a magic trick. I adore cooking and baking, but making space for all of the ingredients and gadgets can be quite the feat. Through trial and error, I’ve found that using vertical space helps enormously, as it clears the counters and takes advantage of otherwise wasted square footage.

So much extra storage!

Its design is so functional.

It’s so gorgeous.

They’re so useful.

My bathroom is a strange place. It has two showers (yes, really) and, naturally, one toilet. I have under-sink storage, and technically the bathroom mirror opens up to what should be a shelved medicine cabinet — except there are no shelves in the medicine cabinet at all. It’s just empty space. As such, and because my bathroom is on the smaller side, I need more storage in my bathroom, always.

I’ve been renting in Brooklyn for 12 years and, as such, I’ve worked through every kind of no-drilling wall hook that money can buy, in pretty much every apartment I’ve ever lived in. But I’ve learned over the past few years that, while I will always need extra storage in my small spaces, cute wall storage is hard to come by.

The DIY transformation was worth every penny.

I use them every single day.

My little corner house is a colonial-style home built in the 1930s, when galley kitchens were incredibly common and larger formal dining rooms were prioritized. The galley kitchen doesn’t necessarily feel cramped, but its layout is incredibly awkward.

When I return home from grocery shopping and unload and sort through all my shopping bags, my fridge inevitably gets packed to the brim with stuff. Each shelf and drawer is stocked up — especially the produce drawers that get filled with not only fresh fruits and vegetables, but also the individual containers or bags they’re often sold in.

When it comes to storage in my small bathroom, I have three options: an already-full medicine cabinet, a slim under-sink cabinet (and the tiny countertop) with barely enough room to fit cleaning supplies, and two floating glass shelves above my toilet. I’m not one for visual clutter, so I’ve only put a few items on the glass shelves (which makes them an impractical solution).