I live in a small apartment in New York, with limited closet space, that I share with another person. Until recently, I still had that “clothes chair” that everyone seems to have in their bedrooms: the place where clothes live that are in constant rotation or that have been worn but aren’t ready to be washed. I didn’t want to hang anything back in the closet because I wanted to have eyes on these garments, and also, it’s always an ordeal to put them on hangers at the end of the day. The pile would get higher and more precarious, crisp shirts would get wrinkled, dresses scrunched, pants lost.
On Pinterest one day, I saw something: a ladder that doubled as a place to hang clothes. Once you’ve been down the Pinterest K-hole of wall ladders, with extremely specific and minute detail differences between them (wood or metal? Blond wood or dark pine? Six rungs or five?), it may be hard to choose. It helped that I had specific parameters: Get my stuff off the ground and don’t take up a lot of space doing it and don’t look hideous and don’t cost too much. The Yamazaki Home Tower Leaning Ladder Rack fit all these rules. It leans on the wall next to my dresser and it holds shirts I wear a lot, the three black dresses I wear again and again to work (the tower is helpful for “uniform dressing”), and, well, bras. Everything gets its own rung. Stuff is off the ground, off the chair, and I can see it all. The bras aren’t hanging on the bedroom doorknob like I’m still in college. I rotate things in and out of my closet and onto the tower as the seasons change: shorts and Eileen Fisher tanks in the summer, sweaters and wool pants in the colder months. It’s $55, and it hasn’t fallen on me yet. I have my bedroom chair back to actually sit on (or really, to stack books on: a problem for another day). I take this as a victory.
The ladder comes in white and black, but is slightly cheaper in white (by a couple bucks).
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