How to Organize A Walk-In Closet

This is Part 2 of the Walk-In Closet story. As I mentioned in my last post, first David and I painted the 4 walls and ceiling a calming blue, which I love.

How Can I Organize My Walk-In Closet?

We played around with the layout of our walk-in closet and ultimately decided to make a focal point with a laundry hamper and aesthetically pretty mirror then surround it by built-in shelves, curtain rods and a floor-to-ceiling shoe rack.

1. Find A Stylish Mirror

I scrounged around online for a while until I found a nice sized mirror for a great price ($29!). My goal was something that I would like and give the closet an anchor. I wanted a focal point but I also wanted to see my reflection when getting dressed. We hung a great mirror on sale from Kirkland. An added bonus is it reflects a lot of light into this windowless space.

2. Built-In Shelving

Next our contractor built some great shelves for us.  We decided on a nonconventional layout– one side of the closet was pretty normal with a closet rod going all the way across and shelving above it, but the other side we split into 2 sections.  One section has a shoe rack and the other has two closet rods (one touching the ceiling, one at waist-height) separated by a shelf.

Below you can see the beginnings of the shoe rack as wall as the newly installed closet rod hanging from the ceiling. (Note: we got all of our closet rods from OrganizeIt.com which went out of business! Womp womp. I’m sure there are fabulous alternatives elsewhere nowadays.)

3. Stackable Shoe Rack

We bought the shoe rack from wayfair.com and actually bought 3 of them that can stack on top of each other.

Then we took out the shoe rack, though, to paint the shelves (same blue color) and our contractor stained the pine floor to match the heart pine in our bedroom:

(He also stained the closet doors to match, which I love.  Originally I was going to paint them white like every other door in our house but figured why not be a little different in the master suite!)

We added cute little brackets under the shelves for additional support although I’m pretty sure they’re mostly for looks. Those shelves are super sturdy.

After the floors and paint totally dried, David installed the shoe rack. 

It was very important to me that this thing be STURDY so that if Evie ever wanted to try on a pair of my shoes that was on the top shelf, I wouldn’t have to worry about the shoe rack falling on her.  David bolted it into the wall using these brackets:

Thanks to the baseboard molding and a clearly level / square floor, he couldn’t get the smallish bracket to attach to both  the wall and the shoe rack.  Rather than have to wait yet another day to go back to the store to exchange for some bigger brackets, he got creative and broke some spare wood into “shims” (which I think he made up) to get the job done!  He thought only doing 4 of them would definitely secure it to the wall but ended up doing 8 (and why not?).  And believe me– that shoe rack is not going ANYWHERE.

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4. Move in A Laundry Hamper

The next thing we did was buy a laundry hamper.  I wanted a nice focal point for the closet to make it feel more like a room and less of a storage unit, and plus we needed a nice laundry hamper anyway.  For less than $200, I thought this was a good deal.

David hung the closet rods (what a rockstar!) and we stuck our clothes back in!  (Side note: we read the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up before we put our clothes back in the closet, and I think we only kept about 50% of our clothes after deciding which ones ‘brought us joy’ per the book’s instructions.  Highly, highly recommend it!)

Love how the shoe rack turned out! I am so glad we now have a place to store all of our hang-up clothes!  🙂  Overall it was well worth getting the abandoned chimney demo-ed so we have space for this.  Next time I’ll be sure to show you how the little closet to the right turned out for the rest of David’s things!