Natural Curls and My Wardrobe

As I share this blog post with you, I’m being separated from my wardrobe. In the last year I have had several logistical adventures with all of my clothes. The first was when I moved into a beautiful two bedroom cottage, all by myself. As you can imagine, I have a lot of clothes and I needed to a lot of space. I used the second bedroom as a dressing room and decked it out with four shoe racks and three double bar clothes racks. There were many tragic events involved clothes racks collapsing, simply because the clothes racks and rails sold to the general population aren’t the same strength and quality as the commercial clothes racks used in retail. I culled a lot of clothes because then I had to move all of what remained to Western Australia.

In the process of culling, packing and sorting I was trialing another wardrobe app. This app is called Stylebook and I fell in love with it. I’d tried other wardrobe apps before but this one had everything I needed to make a function digital library of my clothes. It took a long time to enter everything into it, and I started with the clothes I wore the most. Eventually I got it to a level where most of the clothes I own are in the app. As I get new clothes I take new pictures of them, or I download photos off the internet and add them to the catalogue. I’m currently sitting on 522 items (including shoes, bags, hats, jewellery) and I’m not finished yet.

In order to get set up in WA, I had to come up with a clothing storage system that would fit all of my clothes. Naturally, I ended up at IKEA, looking at pictures and planning. Because I had the Stylebookapp, I was able to figure out exactly how much space I would need for certain items, and adjust my plan to suit. This also worked when planning out shoes. I knew the average amount of space a pair of shoes took up in and was able to use that to calculate how many shoes would fit in a certain sized book case in order to buy something that would fit them all. The planning of the wardrobe itself was really easy because of the PAX system planning tool on the IKEA website.

In order to fit the room we went with 2 x 1 meter hanging spaces. Full length hanging at the top and half length hanging beneath. This meant I needed a small step in order to reach the top rail. In one side where I hang shorter dresses and the like, I put a glass shelf between the two hanging spaces on the right side. The glass would allow light through and would also make a space for me to put hats. Having the two larger cupboards meant I could have sliding doors and a full length mirror too. In the side section at waist height I added a shelf (with LED lights around the outside, as it gets dark in there). On the right of this shelf cavity is a scarf and neck tie tail that slides out on a runner like a drawer. Beneath the shelf are two shallow drawers for belts, watches, headbands and similar items. I also have a rail for my belts which extends out on a runner just inside the right hanging space; this is in the central hanging section. There’s also a valet hook on the very left, which allows me to hang outfits that I am going to wear the next day.

Most of my wardrobe is packed up in boxes waiting for me, but I don’t miss it too much as a lot of what is packed is for cooler weather.

Who am I kidding. It actually really sucks to be separated from your things and I’m really looking forward to being reunited with my clothes and shoes and hats and scarves. Here are some pictures of me in front of my wardrobe enjoying the clothes that I have left.