Since we talked about clothes a little bit ago, I thought the timing was too good to be true. We installed some closet shelving! Kazoos. Tambourines. Cupcakes with swirls of buttercream. We’re excited.

I won’t even show you what it looked like behind that pocket door before the shelving went in. Let’s just say Montana Blizzard in January.

Our closet is a narrow walk-in space that runs the length of our bedroom. We wanted a space that could serve as:

• a traditional closet
• dressers
• mudroom-like storage
• a place for general storage

That meant our closet needed to hold:

• all of our clothes
• puffy winter coats, snowpants, mittens, and long underwear
•  sleeping bags
• flight bags (full of maps, headsets, and charts)
• shoes and boots
• bags and backpacks
• wrapping paper
• hidden Christmas gifts (shh… you didn’t see that, Martin)
• my journals and a few of our childhood scrapbooks/memorabilia
• various other items

You see, I hated how much time I was spending each season at the tire house with swapping out our seasonal clothes. We were often forgetting what we had or hanging onto things that we didn’t really need or like. I’ll tell you more about the purging process as we moved into this closet a bit later.

Let’s quit yacking, stuff our faces with cake, and just open the door.

We ordered shelving from The Container Store.

If it weren’t for Janesters, I never would have heard of this “city slicker store”. They were selling baskets made of repurposed tires in Jane’s DC area store, and well… I guess she thought that was something we’d want to remind of us of the tire house. We didn’t. But one thing lead to another, and now here we are.

Those drawers are the perfect place for storing socks, t-shirts, and mittens. Laundry basket below. We still have some shelving to cut and install to their left. I’d like to keep all of our shoes there.

Where you see my red wool coat, we also keep my wedding dress, robes, and a few other dresses. Then there’s about 12″ of open wall, which you can’t see in this photo. That gives me enough room to see everything I have and dig around (or get dressed if there’s company!). The vacuum is also back there with all my scarves, jewelry, and down coat and vest.

Now who wants cake? Oh wait. That’s not what we’re chatting about. Clothes, Katie, clothes. How do you keep your clothes organized? Are they all together?