The Costume Closet is Finished

I know folks are probably tired of hearing about my stupid closet, but it’s finally finished! So I’m going to go over it once more 🙂

So a question I get asked a lot is “Where do you keep all of your costumes?”
When I lived with my parents, the question was pretty easy to answer – we had converted a small half bath into a closet for me to keep all of my costumes in. Towards the end before I moved out, I was outgrowing it, but it generally did the job just fine.

My costume closet circa 2004 - at my parents' house.I stored all my costumes in one closet (out of sight out of mind) - during "con season"; the closet was a horrible mess, like it was here. During the winter I would straighten everything up and put things away and it looked much nicer. I never took a picture of it looking neat.

(This was it when it was a messy state. I can’t find my pic of it when it was nice and neat! One does exist, I swear!)

When Chase and I got our first place together, our spare bedroom had a full walk-in closet. That naturally became the costume closet, and it was pretty awesome. I could hang almost everything, which was so nice. I had some shelves to put things on and space in the back for a good number of bins (I could usually get about 6 or 7 bins back there.)
I never got it as organized as I would have liked, but since we knew we’d be moving on sooner rather than later, there wasn’t much point to really fixing it up.

The apartment era - 2007-2008. I had a huge walk in closet where I could store my costumes. One of the few things I miss about living in the apartment vs our house!

We love our new house but the one thing it lacks is closet space. The only space available for my costumes was one measly little reach-in closet. While I probably could have fit everything in there in my usual big bins, I knew that wasn’t going to be good in the long run. #1, because having 20-30 costumes in one bin usually means something gets broken, scratched, ripped, etc, and #2, because having to look for something means moving multiple heavy bins in and out of a small space, followed by much digging, cussing, and mess-making. I know this from experience, believe me.

So I decided I was going to have to come at this with a new approach. I brainstormed for a while and eventually this is what I decided to go with: small bins, each with 2-3 costumes a piece in them. They’ll never get so heavy I have trouble lifting them, and it should minimize damage to delicate pieces that way, also. I can slide the bins in and out how I want – keep the older costumes in the hard to get at corners, things I know I’ll be wearing soon on the top center.

To start the process I had to get things in order first, which was a task. A lot of my older stuff hadn’t been sorted in years. Everything was still in a mess from moving – stuff was stuffed in huge boxes, space bags, bins, where-ever I could get it. I started out with the handful of bins I had in my office:

And what started out as a few bins in the corner of the living room quickly escalated into a disaster area:

Its a disaster area D:BUT! I think have about 60% of my costumes in their bins now, most bins have 2-3 costumes in them (in rare cases, 1 costume, or sometimes luckily 4-5 small ones). I need to get a few more bins that I stored at my parents house and distribute that stuff into bins, that'll be this weekend... next week my new set of moo cards will be here, I'll be taping those to the front of each bin to show what's inside of them.

So before I even had everything sorted I started putting boxes in the closet, because I was super excited to see how it would look.

starting sticking boxes into the closet this afternoon. it's all going to fit. zomg. still got about 4 or 5 more to put in there.

I thought it would be easier for me to have pics on the outside of the bins, and I had the perfect thing to use: my mini-moo cards, which I got back in 2007 to hand out at cons, but never remember to. Might as well put them to use! I had another new set made to fill in the gaps of what costumes I didn’t have on the cards.

They came today :) These are what I'm using on the front of my new costume bins, but I had enough space leftover to make a few new ones to hand out at cons :)

So I was probably about 75% done when I went to retrieve what I thought was the last box of costume pieces – but ended up finding about 3 or 4 more boxes, plus props, plus I kept finding stuff as I was cleaning! It eventually got to the point I was getting frustrated having to constantly pull boxes out to add more stuff to – I’d pull out a box to put a pair of shoes in and suddenly it doesn’t fit anymore. So in frustration I started over. I lined up EVERYTHING in the hallway.

I had an attack of the crazies today... I wasn't all that happy with what costumes I'd put together in each box, plus I kept finding old stuff and having to go back and add to finished boxes... So i took everything out, laid each costume out with everything, and redid. them. Much happier with it now :)anyway I said all that to say, I thought it was neat having everything laid out in the hallway like this, so I took a pic. Ignore the bins and stuff in the background.

And yes, they’re in chronological order because that’s just the way I am. LOL.
Once I got everything laid out and made sure every costume had every piece it needed to go with it, getting them back in the boxes was easy and MUCH more efficient than the first time around.

And here’s the finished product:

There's still room for one more bin!!!!I had to expand to the top shelf. The larger two bins that are up there are my TK armor, and an "oversized" bin for pieces that won't fit in the new small bins.There's also room on the sides for various weapons and blasters and swords and stuff. yay :)(And costumes that hang in garment bags are stored in the closet in my sewing room. So there are no ballgowns wadded up in these bins!)

Some notes…
1. The older costumes are in the corners and along the top, newer costumes in the center towards the top. There’s still room in a few of them to keep adding stuff.
2. Some of them don’t have the full costume- certain costumes are hanging in my offices’ closet – Anne Boleyn, Belle, things that I didn’t want to have squished inside the box.
3. Inside the top is an index card taped to the top with the contents written on it. This is mostly to let me know if something is missing – ie, for things that share boots or wigs: “wig is in the Wonder Woman bin.”
4. I have two oversized bins – one is on the top center. It’s just props or pieces that wouldn’t fit in the new bins, like my Kingdom Come Wonder Woman shinguards or something. The other is in the garage and has older props or large shoes that I really don’t need to have inside for anything.
5. The only costume that gets a bin completely to itself is Boushh.

I love to organize things like this, so I had a lot of fun getting this finished. I feel like I can start working on new stuff now that the old stuff is taken care of!