Showing posts with label Storing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Storing. Show all posts

17 August 2013

Closet Annex

You all know I have a lot of clothing. Our apartment has minimal closet space, so I gradually gave up on the idea of being able to keep everything in one place. I bought a pop-up closet so I could store suits and other things I don't wear often in the basement. Later I added a second one for winter coats and other out of season items.

But I bought cheap ones, and I made the mistake of overloading them. Gradually their top frames warped from the weight, one tipped over, and the other blew out its back seam. A couple of months ago I bought two replacements from The Container Store that have heavier-weight canvas exterior shells. I put them in the basement and kind of forgot about them.

With the very pleasant weather we've been having this week, it's nice and comfortable in the basement, so I decided Thursday that I had procrastinated long enough, and headed downstairs to put the things together. While doing so I also set aside some things that I no longer want, and some things I want to try to sell. I also did a little reorganization of how I was storing things.

The new pop-ups have the same sort of frames as the old ones, so I decided to pay more attention to how much I put in them so they are not overloaded. My suits and sport coats are now hanging with enough space that they won't get wrinkled. Plus, after shifting everything around, I realized that I had enough usable pieces left over from the two old ones that I was able to cobble together a third unit, which I'm using to hold all the things that are going to be sold.

The new units also came with corrugated panels for the tops and bottoms, so it's possible to store things that are in boxes, like a couple of straw hats I have. Again I wouldn't use these "shelves" for anything heavy, but it's nice to have the additional area.

It felt good to do something productive, but I still have a lot of stuff downstairs that I have to deal with.

05 January 2013

Hang It Up

Wire hangers have faded from common use (aside from when you get your clothing back from a dry cleaner). But I'm no fan of plastic hangers either. Several years back I replaced my plastic shirt hangers with wooden ones. I bought them in boxes of 20 at Bed Bath and Beyond. They still carry them, but they aren't as good a deal now; I think they come in packages of six or 12.

If you live in the vicinity of an Ocean State Job Lot store, there's a much better deal available to you. They have wooden hangers for 50 cents each, which is about what I paid per hanger for my first couple of batches from BB&B. These don't have a crossbar, so they might not work so well for heavier outerwear, but if you stick to using them for shirts and light jackets, they will do just fine.

Yesterday I discovered an even better deal at Job Lot: suit hangers. Suit jackets and sportcoats should be hung on wider hangers to preserve the shape at the shoulders and keep the jacket draped properly. Several of my sportcoats are vintage items I found on eBay, and a couple of my suits were bought online, so none of them came with hangers. Even if you buy a suit from a department store, there's no guarantee you'll get an appropriate hanger with it. You might have to ask for it, or you may be told it's store policy to keep the hangers.

What you want is a hanger that flares out toward the ends to at least a couple of inches wide. A bar for holding trousers is also nice. OSJL has hangers like this for only $2.25 each. I've been looking for such hangers for a while now; the best price I've been able to find online is $6 each for ones without a crossbar, $7 each with the bar, from a site called Wooden Hangers USA. I was about to place an order from them, and while the hangers I found yesterday may not be as durable, the lower cost is much better for my wallet at the moment. I grabbed half a dozen, and I may go back for more if needed.

30 May 2011

Oversize Load

Our long weekend has been split between having fun and getting things done around the house. In the fun department, we saw Bridesmaids last night, and I recommend it highly. Not only is it really funny, but it's also a very honest and realistic story. On Saturday we went to see England's Propeller Theatre Company performance of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors at the Huntington (thanks again, Lisa!), which was all-around excellent.

In the housekeeping department, I'm almost caught up on my laundry, plus I've finished rotating my seasonal clothing into and out of storage. But in the process I did something stupid, and learned a lesson. I have a rolling garment rack in the basement that I use for storing items of clothing that I don't use often. I throw a sheet over it, so it's almost like a pop-up closet. Actually, I already have two of those in the basement; originally I bought this rack to hang drying things, but it morphed into additional storage.

Last year I hung some flannel shirts on the rack, then took them back upstairs when it got cold. Yesterday I took the flannel shirts downstairs and put them on the rack again, and it broke and everything fell onto the concrete basement floor. The rack has a height adjustment at either end, and I suspect it had gotten loose, and then the shirts were too much weight for it. (In between last year and this year I'd added a couple of fairly heavy coats to the rack.)

Amazingly, I was able to balance the cross rod on the remaining portions of the upright poles; the plastic broke in such a way that the pieces left behind are concave, and so they hold the rod in place. This will have to do temporarily until I can replace the rack, but at least the shirts and coats aren't on the dirty floor.

I knew there was a weight limit for this rack, but I never bothered to learn what it was. I'm going to invest in a larger, heavier-duty, all-metal rack with a higher weight limit, so I don't have to worry about this sort of thing again.