Fine Tuning Your Closet Space in Your Small Home or Apartment

If you live in a small home or apartment chances are your closets are a precious commodity. 

But having these few and far between closest crammed with clutter can make life a little difficult. Imagine getting dressed for work and an avalanche of gift wrapping paper and ribbons lands on top of your head.  It can happen. It has happened but let’s keep it from happening to you.

Your space is limited and you don’t want to leave holiday decorations up all year long do you?

Let’s look at some other ways to solve this dilemma.

Specialize: First you’ll want to, as much as possible, delegate the few closets you have for specified things.

For your clothes closets try to keep the items in here as closely related as possible. You can store off season clothing in suitcases or bins. And delegate the shelves above for things like bedding. In amongst the sweaters of course. Maximize the shelving to the ceiling. We often ignore that upper space. Use things like those nice cloth covered boxes that can be found at Ikea or even online. Shelf dividers can keep folded sweaters from fall down on you too.

Now for the rest of your closets try to organize them too.

I’ll give you an example. we had a small two bedroom apartment with 5 closets. One clothing closet in each bedroom, a (thank goodness) small linen closet in the master bedroom, one in the hallway, and one that was actually where the washer and dryer went. The hall closet held coats and all outside gear (of course) and also the vacuum cleaner. It was easiest to roll it in there. The second bedroom doubled as an office at first and so held office supplies. When the baby came home we divided the closet. Half for office supplies and off season decorating the other half baby to toddler (we moved when she was a toddler). The laundry closet, in addition to holding two appliances held anything needed for home maintenance. The bathrooms and kitchen cabinets held their own cleaning supplies. The linen closet, the real life saver, was a very small shelving unit surrounding the hot water tank. Kind of ingenious now that I think about it but I stored a bunch of stuff in there. It held sheets, towels, collected gifts, wedding presents, my collection of soap and household scented products and goodness knows what else.

Containerize: What really helped me to maximize the closet space in such a small home was the shelving. Shelving is a wonderful addition to any closet, especially for one that has an odd assortment of storage items. And you don’t have to break the bank to pull it together.

If you find things running all over the place on your shelves try grouping like items together on each shelf and then add in bins and baskets where appropriate to keep things neat and tidy. You can purchase baskets and bins for just pennies at your local dollar store or even Target that has a dollar store section.

Declutter: Take a good look at what you have in your closets. If you find yourself running out of room this is a great time to declutter that area and rethink the space.

Some other ways to maximize tight closet space

1.) If the closet has a door on hinges use over the door organizers and hooks to store extra items.

2.) Don’t forget the floor. In your clothing closet you can store shoes on tiered shoe racks and get many, many pairs in a small space.

3.) Are the ceilings in your closet as tall as the room? Use fabric boxes or baskets to store stuff to the top!