Dress Up Storage

Dress Up Storage That Fits a Ton

This is an easy system for storing all of our kids dress up costumes.

January means organization, right, so it’s only fitting that my first post of the year be about wrangling my girls’ dress ups! As you can imagine… with five children, we’ve accumulated a TON of dress ups and they were bursting at the seams. I had one old dress up dresser and then we’ve overflowed into two large hampers… And then, we added princess shoes and purses and makeup, etc. for Christmas. It was time.

Rather than retrofitting an enormous armoire from Craigslist, I decided to take a gander at my favorite big box store from Europe. They had exactly the solution I wanted: tall storage that had hooks and drawers. Hooks because my girls will NEVER hang things on hangers so anything with a rod would be a waste of time. And drawers to help separate the smaller items like shoes and wigs and hats. I bought two PAX units that were 30 inches wide and 79 inches tall. The PAX has about 700 ways to arrange it and I opted for 2 pairs of these sliding hooks, 2 pairs of shelves and then 2 pairs of these wire drawers.

To add a little ‘glam’ to the units, I quickly wallpapered the back piece of cardboard with this adhesive butterfly paper (affiliate) before nailing them onto the shelf. (Note: the adhesive paper I used feels more like contact paper, but I loved the butterflies and it was a great price… I probably wouldn’t choose this for walls!)

The hooks are a little bit high for the girls, but I really wanted those drawers… I have a step stool that will live in front of the dress ups, but if it’s a problem in a couple of months, then I’ll rearrange everything.

The two units are screwed together and I’ll anchor them to the wall, but the girls have also been given *strict* instructions not to crawl into the unit or climb on the shelves.

We went through the dress ups before I hung everything to throw out any that were ripped or too small. We still have one basket of costumes that are still way too big, but it’s really nice not to have the smaller dress up items scattered around the house the way they were! This thing holds A TON!!!

To give the girls a little light in this corner, I grabbed this sweet plug in wall light. I LOVE the color and it’s and LED light so it won’t get too hot for them.

All in, I think this cost me $150 so it’s not ‘budget’ persay, but… if any of you are on dress up overload then I know you get it. This free standing unit keeps everything organized, took an afternoon to put together, and is well worth it in my opinion! Did I mention how much it fits????