If you have normal closets, God bless you. Those of us with angled closets like those under stairs have to get creative, and I’m here to help. Well, me and this adorable angled closet under the stairs.

This closet is actually a bit more useful than some I’ve seen, but it’s not easy to keep organized because of the “way back” angled space.

Remember to SORT and Succeed here. It doesn’t take long to get this space more functional, but it’ll take much longer if you don’t have a plan.

The One Big Tip is to buy the biggest hooks you can. I love hooks that are six inches high, or more. Don’t bother with anything smaller. With hooks this big, you can easily have two or even three useable hooks. Mount hooks to a backer board, never into plaster or drywall.

Always load the lower hook first to maximize their usefulness. With the long coats on the higher hooks and the short coats on the lower back wall, the single gym bag on the floor now is easy to find and grab.

Once we have the coats taken care of, we can maximize what little vertical space we have by hanging hats above.

Then we have to deal with the angled part of the closet. With any angled (or dormer) space, the geometry will almost always force you to either pull the shelves out from the wall a bit, or to mount extra deep shelves. Here, we aren’t mounting anything. In fact, we removed the little mounted shelf that was basically useless. Instead, we’re re-using a short shelf unit that was already there, but we’re going to position it towards the wall that’s farthest from the door, so we can see it from the doorway. And we’re going to pull it forward from the slanted ceiling a bit, so we don’t bonk our heads when reaching in.

The shelves themselves are pretty useless without bins…and without each bin having a job. We re-purposed bins from other parts of the home and gave them each a job. Some are holding mittens and such. One is holding the spare vacuum parts. All of them got a little tag label.

This shelf positioning gives us a little negative space that’s perfect to store the vacuum cleaner. It’s out of the way, not in front of the coats, but still easy to get to. We talked about negative space in this article. 

Just like yesterday’s hooks in the linen closet, a single hook for a broom and dustpan keeps those things off the floor and easy to access.

We could have spent about $600-$1,000 to put a closet system in this closet, and while I might have been able to create more shelf space, that wasn’t what this family needed. They just need a way to keep coats up off the floor, and keep things easy to access.

Hopefully these practical and economical ideas will help you make sense of your angled closet under the stairs.

See all January 2021 organizing projects in one place.