Wardrobe Tour, Part 3

The next closet I'm going to show you is the one that holds my skirts, dresses, dress pants, and most importantly, the shoes. As you can see it opens directly across from the one I showed you yesterday. This is often how I get ready in the morning; by opening up both closets so that I can go back and forth between them. The door of the closet has more of the over-the-door hooks for my handbags (and, if you look closely, my hockey skates). By the way, if you think that the fabulous closets weren't a huge deciding factor when I looked at my apartment, think again.

When you open up the closet it looks pretty packed, and indeed it's a fairly tight squeeze to get in there. However the rack on the right was a necessary addition, since before that I had all my skirts, dresses, and pants packed onto the narrow rack on the back wall. I still don't understand why in old apartments they always put the garment rack along the shortest wall; what's wrong with putting it on the longest one?

The nice thing about the rack I added is that it is wheeled, and can be pulled all the way out of the closet if I want. It also has support bars at the bottom that are spaced just right for holding the shoes I'm going to wear that week. All my fully-assembled outfits for the week go on the very end of the rack so that I can just reach in and grab them. Dresses go in the long section on the left, longer skirts on the top rack, and shorter skirts and cropped pants on the bottom. On the door to the right-hand closet you can just see a couple of extra hooks there on the top; these are for in the morning when I pull out one of my outfits, so that I have somewhere to hang it as I take each piece off the hanger.

On to the shoes. The left side of the closet already had built in shelves when I moved in, but since the shelves are twice as high as a pair of shoes, they waste a lot of space. I solved that problem, and effectively doubled my shoe storage, by using extendable metal racks that cut each shelf in half top to bottom. I didn't consider using those over-the-door shoe holders with pockets, because I find that they frequently don't have pockets big enough for anything but a slim pair of sneakers or sandals, so they really don't hold as many pairs of shoes as they claim to.

Finally, here's a look a little deeper into the closet, where you can see all my dress pants hanging on the tiered hangers. Since the wheeled rack makes it a little tough to fully utilize the whole length of the built-in bar behind it, I use the accessible part for dress pants and the part buried behind the wheeled rack for super dressy stuff that I don't wear very often.

That concludes today's tour. Come back again tomorrow when I show you my dirty little secret -- a closet that's packed to the gills and not very well organized (right now, at least). That one holds my coats, plus a whole bunch of other random stuff.