A Closet Makeover Before/After

Happy Spring!

May is the month I will be launching my first ever virtual closet makeover program! I have been working on this for a long time and can’t wait to share the details with you in a few weeks.

I promise you’ll be the first to know all the details, but in the meantime, I wanted to give you a fun behind the scenes peek at a recent closet makeover I did in San Francisco, California, so you can see what’s actually possible.

This is a picture I snapped of my client’s closet before:

Look familiar? You can see that she had some bulky items like suitcases and pillows taking up prime real estate, and her clothing and shoes weren’t organized by type, style, or color. She also had an assortment of random mismatched hangers which added to the sense of clutter and disorganization.

The first step in any makeover is to remove every single thing from the closet. We moved the clothing onto my client’s bed and relocated some of the suitcases and other miscellaneous housewares we discovered. Here is a shot we snapped of the closet makeover in action. Things have to get messy before they get tidy!

After a very thorough edit, we grouped the “keepers” by type and then by color, and swapped out the mismatched hangers so we could get a clean, streamlined look. We also used six of these black and white storage bins for stowing seasonal items and accessories. All told, we spent just under one hundred dollars and the entire transformation took just five hours to complete!

I love how streamlined everything looks, and you can see how a good edit and some matching hangers can completely transform a space!

My client was kind enough to also let me style her closet for an editorial photo shoot. For the first look, I focused on creating a capsule wardrobe composed of black and white apparel and accessories and we used white wooden hangers for a clean, polished look:

For the second look, I added some color and pattern and styled jeans stacked by color.

Fun, right? Could your closet use a little refresh? I’ll be back so soon to give you the full scoop on my new program so you can get these same results in your own home. Until then!

Images: Vivian Johnson Photography