DIY acrylic storage trays

As mentioned yesterday, I've been craving lucite storage. This is because lucite or acrylic allows you to see through the storage and examine your loot. This is also because I'm a 70s child who loves shiny plastic things.

Acrylic storage doesn't cost much, but I challenged myself to find acrylic storage that costs nothing at all, and I succeeded. Can you guess what my stacking trays are made from?

In its former life, my big tray was the World's Ugliest Artwork (I may like 70s plastic but I do not care for 70s photography). This plastic box frame shown above was being tossed.

I pulled the photo and cardboard filler out of the back and had myself a tray.

The two small trays started out as a candy box. Someone ate the candy without sharing and tossed the box, which I pulled from the recycle bin. I peeled off the label and had what you see above.

The big tray became home to some of my favorite necklaces and pins.

The two smaller trays display some of my massive pin collection, organized by color.

Stacked, they still reveal what lies beneath.

Have you upcycled anything good lately?

Affordable acrylic storage

Since cleaning up my closet, I now have a craving for bright clear lucite trays and boxes for storing my growing jewelry stash. Above is an acrylic tray from Stacks and Stacks, recently featured in Real Simple.

Two options above from The Container Store: Stacking Acrylic Trays ($5 to $12) and Shallow Trays ($8 to $13)

IKEA has a new line of acrylic storage called Godmorgon, which ranges from $8 to $15 and includes these neat drawer dividers.



Then there are small compartment trays like this one at Stacks and Stacks for $18. One of my favorites - cb2's format tray for $35.00. Just think of the joolz you could spread out in here.

Tomorrow I'll show you my 100% free DIY acrylic storage.

Closet Therapy: Maintain your weight

It's summer and we are done with fooling around cleaning the closets. So this will be my last post of closet therapy this year. Previous posts here. More next year.

Many personal organization experts advise getting rid of clothes that are too tight. I say, no! Do not give up on yourself that way! Keep the threads and lose the weight. (There are exceptions. If you last wore the item at age 19 and you have since pushed out three kids, then some expectations need resetting.)

If you gained five pounds over the winter and your spring clothes don't fit, lose the five pounds. Or next year it will be 10 pounds. Deal with the matter while it can still be addressed with a short-term wacky diet like a juice cleanse.

I have this man to thank for a net loss of three pounds last month. This is Michael Kors, not Karl Lagerfeld. (Karl looks more like Dracula.) Michael made a tomato red sheath dress, which I found in a thrift store last year and could not wear this year without the assistance of special undergarments. Three pounds did the job. Thank you Michael.

Since I did not follow my own advice last year, I have a few more pound to go. And a grey sheath dress very similar to this one is getting me there. During the witching hour (any time after 6 p.m. when the nacho chips start calling my name) I go into my closet and try on this dress. At the rate I'm going, I'll get into it by November.

Closet Therapy: Update, don't duplicate

It's spring and welcome back to my closet wisdom.

Last year's tips were buy cheap, audition your clothes, and be an artist.

My first new tip is to hang a picture of Jackie O in your closet (as Melissa Warner did) and you will automatically make better style choices.

My second is to update what you've got rather than continually duplicating it.

To wit, I own three pairs of white pumps, two of which look remarkably similar. And I almost never wear white pumps. Two pairs went.

I own four white jackets and four grey jackets. One of each needs to go.

Shockingly I found I own seven white skirts (I later found an eighth in the laundry basket.) Out of these, two were wearable as is (the rest were too tight, too long or too short) and of the two wearable ones, one was linen and rayon (a dumb mix of fabric if there ever was one.) Out it went.

I had six black skirts. (I got rid of one and need to get rid of two more.)

I had two pairs of strappy brown sandals. (One went.) I have a half dozen silver ballet flats in various enumerations. (Kept them all. It's an obsession.)

The point is, if you've got lots of things that are almost the same, get rid of a few. This hoarding of multiples is a symptom of memory loss or the search for the ultimate perfect version of the item. You may have five animal print pants, but it may be that none really quite suits. When you find the perfect pant, get rid of all of the pretenders. (Which is why it is sometimes worth it to drop a substantial chunk of change on a perfect item when you find it.)

Image: House Beautiful

Fall Cure 2009: Bedroom

I've been quietly working on Apartment Therapy's Fall Cure. My goals were modest - clean the bedroom closet, pantry, and bathroom cabinet. The two big areas are done. Here are a few pics of my closet - first the 'before', second the simplified 'after.' (Note: There are actually gaps for additional shoes!)





My little jewelry vignette is made with a thrifted blouse stretched over a piece of cardboard for wallpaper. The jewelry tree is, well, a tree - a stick from the park that I did not even bother painting. All the jewelry is courtesy of mom.


You can get a complete tour of my closet organizing techniques here (I know you're fascinated.) Also my Spring Cure after is here. (I actually gave away those red shoes. Sigh.)


Anybody else doing the Fall Cure?

Dressing Room

This is for my mom.

Mom, Anna Sui has an entire room turned into a dressing room/closet - in a Greenwich Village apartment no less. You are not the only woman to have more outfits than Schererazade had plot lines.

From the new Elle Decor.

Closet Organizing - Be an Artist

Here's the last in a series on organizing your closet.

Previous tips were to buy cheap and to audition your clothes.

My final suggestion is to view your closet as more than just storage. It's another room of your house (albeit tiny). If you're reading a home design blog in the first place, you probably like design. So, design your closet. Being an aesthetic snob about it will motivate you to keep the socks put away.

Personally, my bedroom closet is a palace. My pantry is a swamp. That's because I haven't even tried to make the pantry pretty. If I had cute matching bins or something or shelf backing lined with wallpaper, it might be a different story. Maybe next spring. . .

Images: Creative Closetworks, Tom Andrews for LaList (Barbie's Dream Closet), Making It Lovely

More closet therapy

Here's your Monday closet tip, along with some inspiring closet eye candy.

Last Monday's tip was easy come, easy go, which is to say if you don't spend a lot on your clothes in the first place, it's easier to get rid of them when the time comes.

This week's tip: Your closet is a lot like American Idol.

1. Lots of clothes audition for the top spots, but only 10 get to go on tour
2. There are three judges, but Simon is the only one who counts. (Yes, there are technically four judges on AI now, but I can't get into that new one.)

Researchers say that we can only hold five items in our active memory. In a similar way, we can only hold a maximum of 10 outfits in our closet memory. Take a look at your closet and think about which items you wear on a consistent basis. No matter how much stuff you have, you'll tend to wear the same few outfits over and over again. That's because they are comfortable, look good or are easy to pull together. It's a law of nature that if you add a new great outfit, one of your former favorites will drop off the other end. You will never exceed 10 good ones.

The trick is to identify your top contenders and more or less get rid of everything else. To do that, your clothes must audition.

Closet organizing experts will tell you to divide your clothes into 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe'. That's the easy part. Now what to do with the 'maybe' category? Run them past your three internal judges.

Paula: It's not terribly flattering on you. But an empire* waist is very popular right now. And if you stand up straight and hold your shoulders back, it really doesn't look that bad. You really do have a budding eclectic taste. Keep developing that.

Randy: It's just awright for me, dawg.

Simon: I wouldn't bury a dead ferret in it.

The Simon voice will become more sharply insistent as the contest continues. Take your 'maybe' outfit and place it front and center in your closet. Make yourself wear it some time in the next two weeks. If it survives that round, make yourself wear it again within the following two weeks. By now, you either love it or hate it. More likely, you hate it. Actually wearing the outfit will bring back to memory why you haven't been wearing it all along - it itches or it's lumpy or too tight or makes you look washed out in the office bathroom mirror. Ditch it and bring your next 'maybe' outfit in for an audition.

You may find a Jennifer Hudson in there. Here's betting you've also got lots o' William Hung.

*For you Pennsylvania Dutch out there, this is pronounced ahm-pire.

Images: Houzz, House Beautiful, New York Times

How to organize the closet

My closet 2.o

There are already tons of resources to tell you about how to organize your stuff. To that tidy pile of wisdom, I will add the Bromeliad perspective - which is how to organize your closet in a way that is cheap and fun. If it's not cheap, we can't do it. If it's not fun, why bother?

My personal closet organizing breakthrough came after moving from a shared spacious walk-in closet to having my own closet that was about three feet wide. Surprisingly, I had a much easier time getting dressed every morning from the tiny closet than I ever did from the large one. All that I owned was visible and within reach. Any item that didn't pull its own weight had to be tossed - I couldn't spare the square inches.

The lesson I learned was that being happy with y0ur closet has little to do with the size of your closet or the amount of clothes you have. (Don't believe me? Have you ever noticed how the paparrazi always manage to catch some celebrity going to the supermarket without her stylist? And she's usually wearing something schleppy and awful like jogging pants and tennis shoes? Why is this? Because she stood in front of her giagantimous closet and could not find a thing to wear. )

So, here's my Monday tip to help anyone along the way to closet trimness:

Easy come, easy go. It's a lot easier to get rid of a $3 pair of shoes than a $30 pair of shoes. So buy cheap in the first place.

My closet organizing secret

I did a little inventory of my closet and discovered that everything in it was second hand with the exception of 12 items and one pair of shoes. The "new" stuff was all purchased on sale. A lot of the second-hand stuff was free.

My Spring Cure purge pile

As long as the global garment industry keeps pumping out billions of tops, slacks, skirts and shoes, you can afford to let go of that too tight pair of white capri pants. Let someone else have it.

You will find another pair eventually. Trust me. And it will be at least half off.

Dream closet

From Jamie Drake.

Glad I'm not the only one who grabs her girlfriends and drags them to the closet.

Closet makeover

While waiting for my Apartment Therapy spring cure book to arrive, I'll entertain you all with a tour of my closet. I have a feeling closet cleaning will be part of the program. Also, I just love my closet. When visitors come to our new place, what's the first thing I show them? The Manhattan view from the balcony. Nooooo. The closet! Now you all have to see it. (If you prefer the Manhattan skyline, go to the Manhattan category of this blog. What are you doing in Closets anyway?)

Before

So here's my closet before. It's already pretty organized since I regularly groom it. I find it soothing. Also, for the past 10 years, I've worked with closets that were three feet wide. The discipline required was valuable. Compared to what I had before, this closet feels like a Home Depot aisle.

The main changes were decorative, inspired in part by Nicole Balch's closet makover at Making It Lovely. I liked her glass wig head and jewelry tree.

After

After

The 'jewelry tree' is a candleholder my mom picked up at Goodwill years ago. The drawback is that I have impaled my hand more than once on those wrought-iron leaf tips. The wighead and scarf were freebies. The sunglasses are vintage via my mom. (I got the idea about the wighead after taking most of the photos, so sorry about the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't effect.)

Here are some of the organizational details: I hang clothes first by item then by color, jackets and shirts on one side, sweaters and skirts on the other. Out of season clothes go in the back corner of each section.





I have mirrored metal bi-fold doors. Long items like dresses and raincoats are hung on the back with magnets.
Out of season shoes go in pretty shopping bags or beach bags.

Little purses and my horde of decorating magazines go up top.

Belts and jewelry below. I leave the other two dresser drawers mostly empty. After any cleanup, you need to leave some empty space for your dump zone. Otherwise you will dump new things on your closet floor, which is an aesthetic no no.

More scarves and belts are stored inside of the purses. When I'm really organized, the scarf or belt actually matches the purse.

Here's my secret to not overstuffing the closet - I limit the number of hangers I own. I'm Joan Collins about it. ("No wire hangers!") Also, since I'm a little intestinally retentive about my closet in general, the colors matter - I only have black, brown, white, pink or beige hangers. Which is pretty similar to my wardrobe (plus a little green.)

OK, now you can get some chips and go sit on the balcony.