I haven’t blogged in way too long, so I decided to catch up with some of my favorite projects. The first being a wardrobe for all their dress up clothes.
My kids love playing dress up. Truthfully, love dressing the up too. Dress up clothes are so much better now than they were when I was a kid. I remember itchy, stiff outfits. But now the costumes are comfy and wearable anywhere. They had so many and keeping them in a toybox was not working out. I saw some dress up wardrobes, but I have to make everything more complicated than it needs to be by “making it my own.” I also have the habit of thinking “that is too much money when I can just do it myself.” Normally I am wrong and I should have just spent the money, but with this project I definitely saved a lot. All in all, I only paid between $30 and $40 for exactly what I wanted. It is a lot less expensive than the wardrobes I spotted online and holds a lot more costumes.
I am a big fan of refurbishing furniture, so I almost always try to get non-fabric furniture from the Navy-Marine Coprs Relief Thrift Store or the Habitat for Humanity Re-store. The dress up wardrobe was actually a TV entertainment center I scored for $5! I painted it with paint I already had from other projects.
I used a shower tension rod for the clothes hanger. I attached a plastic door mirror to the other one side of the wardrobe, but that area would often get crowded with other toys so I moved it to across the wardrobe. (Those mirrors are cheap, not breakable, and are great or kids room – from the dorm sales at Target).
I moved the VCR shelf to the bottom compartment and although they were very thick and probably not a breaking hazard, I still removed the glass on the bottom doors. I put the foldable storage boxes the costumes were stored in at the bottom compartment to house accessories, and some command hooks on the side of the wardrobe to hang any other accessories. One thing I would not have done again is pay so much attention to the back. I used a pretty damask paper as a backdrop to the inside of the wardrobe, but you can never see it because it is so filled with costumes. Oh well. Maybe the kids will enjoy looking at the pattern when they play “hide and seek” and somehow fall into Narnia at the back of the wardrobe.
