One major problem that wife has is finding enough room for all her clothes. It seems that she misses her walk-in closet for all her storage needs. But she has found a great way to get around that. The lockers on the boat is a whole lot smaller than she was used to, and while she did donate a lot of clothes to Goodwill, she still needs a variety of clothes for her office job. Not only the clothes, but she also needs shoes for different outfits. She isn’t one that likes to iron, when she tried to fit everything in the locker, she realized that she needed to iron daily. This is how she figured out how to to iron.
She went through the clothes and chose enough clothes for 2 weeks, and then she added a few extra shirts. The rest of the clothes went into a storage bag that she could suck out the air and condense down and was able to store on the boat. This was a solution that she still had different outfits to wear, and even though she has more shirts than dress pants she still has the variety of clothes to wear. She added a second rod in the locker so that she could hang her shirts on top, and her pants on the bottom under the shirts giving her “double” the space that she had. This not only gave her more room, but also she didn’t have to iron every day. She found that when she had to iron, it not only took extra time, but something had to be turned off and that irritated her after awhile. Now after she does laundry, she hangs the clothes and it doesn’t need ironed, maybe just a quick touch up.
She had a shoe rack built that comes up a few levels and that is what the pants-rod hooks into, so under the shirts, she has the shoe rack, and then the pants and skirts right beside the shoes. This gives her half of the locker more room to store her work clothes. And gives me my space back. Since my job I can wear jeans and Tee shirts daily, she didn’t care if my clothes were cramped, but hers is a different story. She does have her “play” clothes slowly taking over my side but it’s not as bad as it was. I still have room for my stuff.
On the boat we have an opened box of Arm and Hammer in there to capture odors that moisture can produce. When we go during the day we open the locker doors slightly so that air circulates during the day. We found that it keeps our clothes from smelling musty from it being damp and colder at night. Since our lockers are in the side of the boat and the only thing that protects it from the outside is just fiberglass.
Other options that we have seen on other people’s boats and RV’s is where they added an extra rod over a spare bed that they hung their clothes on, to us that just looks messy and it would drive us both crazy seeing the clothes out all the time, we found that we wear the same clothes all the time, whether to work or on weekends so the rest were occasional clothes that we have in storage bags and we can still get them when we need them, but for the most part them are out of the way from everything else.
Creative storage on the boats or RV’s is a must. Some things just aren’t in logical places. We are fortunate that we have an extra room that once was a second bathroom that has been converted into all storage. We have our small freezer in there, and we added some shelves which gives us nice walk in storage area. We could add rods in there for extra storage, but with the things that we have in there, there just isn’t enough room for the rods. We keep food in there that don’t fit in the kitchen cupboards and extra cushions when we’re not using them. One of the best things that we have is a plastic bin with a lid. This keeps all our papers, books and documents dry and moisture free. It’s packed in such a way that we crammed a lot of things in there, but they are not crumpled. To move that plastic tote, we would have to unpack it first, as it would be too heavy to move with it packed. But it keeps what we need safe from damage. If we really had to we could put this outside when we are tied up or stopped for a few months. Since it has personal information, we don’t want to do that. But we could if we had to.
The one thing that we found that we absolutely need is the plastic storage bags. These can be shaped to fit in odd spaces and removing the air can make some of them flat and stackable. They must be clear so that you can see what is in them and you would be surprised at how much you can fit into each bag.