Karen showed me her newly remodeled bedroom. There’s an open gap between the top of her closet and the ceiling, an ideal place to store off-season clothing, suitcases and rarely needed bedroom items. Karen has three long plastic storage boxes for her off-season clothes, and the boxes would fit perfectly up there. When she tried to actually store the boxes, however, she realized that there was a problem.
The challenge was that the full boxes were too heavy for one person to lift up and down easily. Plus she would need a ladder to reach them in their new home — not a step stool, a ladder! The idea of climbing a ladder while wrestling with full, heavy boxes was a bit scary. Karen realized her original plan wouldn’t work, and hired me to help her rethink the space. She still needed a place to store her off-season clothes, and she didn’t like leaving the gap empty.
We placed the clothing boxes under her bed and fortunately they fit! It was perfect because: a. if she needs something before the seasonal switch, the new spot is easy to access, b. the boxes now don’t require any ladders to reach, and c. when it’s time to pull out her clothes for a new season, she can easily do it herself without calling in a helper.
We still had to decide what to do with the gap above the closet. Karen showed me some beautifully decorated ceramic sculptures. They are art pieces that she enjoys looking at daily, so she had put them on her dresser top. She wondered if moving those sculptures to the gap above the closet could work as a decorative display. We tried it out, and agreed that the sculptures looked good there. It solved the problem of filling the odd naked gap with a much more striking display that the boxes would have been, while giving her more space on her dresser.
Have you ever had a great organizing idea fall apart because of safety or other concerns when you tried it out? Have you come up with a good solution when you had to rethink your plans at the last minute?
Side note: These blog stories feature real clients and their organizing solutions. To maintain client privacy, all names have been changed.