A question I get asked a lot – understandably! – is how I keep & store so many costumes. (If you’ve stumbled on my site from elsewhere, I have a LOT of costumes.) I can tell you figuring out how to store them all isn’t easy, especially when I also have a husband who costumes and all the geeky stuff we collect.
Let me start at the beginning, and I’ll walk you through the various ways I’ve stored my costumes – and how I do it now.
When I still lived with my parents, we had converted a small half bath into a closet for me.
(that’s it in a very messy state, it wasn’t usually like that, but it’s the only picture I have.)
When we moved into our first apartment, I had a lovely, huge walk-in closet. It was SO FABULOUS.
(I miss it.)
Then, in 2009, we moved into our house. I only had a couple of double door reach-in closets to work with, one in my sewing room and one in our guest room. That’s really not a lot of room. At first I was still storing everything in very large plastic bins, which was a pain in the butt, because they were very heavy to move around, and so much stuff was in them that pieces and props were getting damaged. I had to come up with something else, and this was it:
I switched to these small bins which fit easily inside the closet, and are stack-able. These each hold 2-3 costumes. Non-styled wigs and garments I’m not worried about wrinkling are stored in large ziploc baggies with the air pushed out (like a mini-space bag).
I used my mini moo cards (from moo.com!) on the front so I can easily tell what it’s in each box without a ton of digging. On the inside of each top is an index card with the full inventory of the box. If a costume part is elsewhere (say, it’s a piece I wear with two costumes), I write that on the index card so I know where to find it.
(Bonus: here are all of my costumes laid out in order in our hallway, waiting to be put into the new bins right after I got them!)
The top shelf has two larger bins which hold my oversized pieces, then I have one more large bin I keep in the garage with older shoes and things.
Then in the other closet (the one in my sewing room), I have costumes or wigs I don’t want squished up into the bins hanging in the closet in my sewing room:
Since I made this post, I’ve since gotten those bins out of that closet (they were mostly fabric) and given myself more room for hanging garment bags! Top shelf of that closet is also wig storage, and another space for oversized pieces.
So that was my solution to the problem; it works for now. I would LOVE to switch over to large plastic drawers fitted to the closet, but that is just too far out of my budget. What I really need is a bigger house, haha.
2018 EDIT:
Bigger house you say?! Five years after this post we are currently packing up our house to sell and (hopefully) move into a larger space.
The guest room closet with the bins mostly stayed the same since I initiated this bin system in 2010. The only problem was adding more and more and more costumes to it, I began to run out of room for the bins! Plus, they stopped making this specific bin so I had to switch to the new version which had a GREY top and drove me crazy that they didn’t all match anymore LOL. But it stayed pretty functional for 8 years.
The closet in the sewing room on the other hand…
First off, I’ve had 2 massive closet breaks in there. The weight of the hanging costumes was too much for the cheap wire shelf that came with the house.
We repaired it and put in a vertical shelf to act as a pillar and help support it.
As you can see there’s a WHOLE lot more hanging costumes now than there was in the 2012 photo. I also had to start putting the small storage bins on the shelf in here after I ran out of room in the other closet. There’s some oversized stuff on the floor underneath the hanging costumes as well. Where did wigs go? I ended up switching our hall bathroom’s closet to wig storage. I’ve been able to fit 8-10 wig boxes in there at a time. Considering that closet was already where I kept all my costume makeup and hair stuff, it seemed fitting to go ahead and add wigs… although then we had nowhere to keep our towels anymore LOL. We had to buy a shelf unit for our master bathroom to put the towels in!
And then a year after we repaired the closet…. it broke again. Tore the top part of the vertical shelf right off and pulled out of the wall again. This time we tore the wire shelf out, replaced it with a wooden shelf separate from the pipe shelving we installed. This version seems to have stayed pretty consistent.
As of this writing though – both closets are empty! I have taken everything over to my parents’ house for storage while we move. Here’s hoping I have a bigger closet at our next house. I’ll do a new post about how I handle whatever comes next 🙂