Living in small rental apartments means small wardrobes, so here are some easy tips and tricks that don’t require any remodelling to make more space for your shoes and clothes.
This is a double-sided wardrobe, the other half is my boyfriend’s clothes and I will share that side with you at a later date. You can also check out how I dealt with his rather large denim collection in our last place here.
All I have done is make some very simple removable shoe shelves at the bottom and add some plastic tubs from Dollarama. I keep things like scarves, belts and hats in the tubs. All up it cost me about £35, which makes it nice and affordable.
You will need some wood for the shelves; make sure you take your measurements first (I got mine at Home Depot). Something to hold the wood together, I used screws. I have as many plastic tubs as will fit along the top shelf. I found that Dollarama and Target sell similar ones, too, but at a much higher price.
- Take the dimensions for your shoe shelves (Don’t forget to subtract the skirting/baseboards). I chose to leave space at the end with no shelving so that my floor-length dresses had space to hang. Make note of how high you would like each shelf, my bottom shelf is higher than the second one. I good height to go by is the height of your tallest heel. Lastly, you need your max depth, however, don’t get too caught up on this number as the shelving wood only comes in 2 – 3 widths so you want to work with what’s on offer. My bottom shelf is deeper than the top one. If your shelves are long you will also need extra support in the middle to stop them from bending under weight.
- Now that you have your dimensions dead to the hardware store, pick your wood and have them make the cuts there (trust me, you don’t want to be cutting laminate shelving with a hand saw!)
- Assembly time. Please don’t judge my craftsmanship here! Remember that I made these shelves knowing that the joins would never really be seen and therefore simply screwed everything together most quickly and simply possible.
- Place storage tubs on the top shelf and ta-da, your hard work has paid off. Now for the fun part of working out which order your shoes should be placed in!
