Homemade Clothes Racks or Shelves

Old Drawer Shelves

• Make charming shelves out of old dresser drawers that don't run smoothly anymore. The drawers will be reoriented so that their openings face the room, and their handles hang down toward the floor. You can cover any unfinished wood on the drawers with funky wallpaper. Build a horizontal wooden shelf into each drawer, so that they each end up with two surfaces on which to store clothing. Hang the drawers on your walls where ever you have space.

Bar and Screen

• Install a metal closet bar in your bedroom. One end should be installed directly into a wall and the other end into a support stand built out of finished wood. The support stand can be decorated with carvings. Alternately, show off the beauty of nature by lacquering a large piece of driftwood, affixing its lower end to a base and attaching the other end of the bar to its upper end. Use a changing screen to hide the untidy look of hanging clothes from the rest of the bedroom.

Crates and Twine

• Tying together stacked plastic crates with pieces of twine is a quick and cheap fix for a bedroom without clothing or shoe shelves. Tying the crates together adds stability. It allows you to stack the crates high, saving your floor spacing without creating worries about the crate stacks slipping around or falling. However, a crate tower can look somewhat unattractive. The best option is to throw together a matrix of crates as large as you need, and then, when you have more time, to sew cloth linings for each one. The cloth linings should include strips of fabric stitched to their outer corners that can be tied to secure the linings to the crates. A large, decorative piece of fabric can then be laid over the sides and top of the crate structure, hiding the crates altogether.

Outfit Organizer

• Horizontally along one wall, affix a series of coat racks. The coat racks can be painted to match the room, or with an accent color; they can be made out of plumbing pipes or out of a branch from the forest with brass hooks attached. Use each coat rack hook to hang a day's outfit. Using hangers that have clips, you'll be able to hang any garment you would normally fold, including jeans. You'll find that this not only saves time in the morning, it also keeps your clothes from wrinkling. The quick-and-dirty version: Hang a two-by-four horizontally on one wall. Hammer long, brass nails into the two-by-four to create makeshift hooks, then hang your outfits on hangers on these nails.