What to do with the dead space on top of a wardrobe
There is a shoebox up there. Has been since March 2022. Inside it, four picture hooks, a dead phone charger, and a single sock we have both silently agreed not to investigate.
That top of the wardrobe gap became the place where things go to be forgotten, in our house and, I suspect, in most others. Nobody plans it. It just fills up, the way a junk drawer fills up, except this one is at head height above a piece of furniture, so you can’t even see the crime scene until you drag a chair over and confront it.
Dan stood on that exact chair in January, looked at the shoebox, the charger, the sock, and said, “why do we own the wardrobe equivalent of a coat pocket.” Fair question. We didn’t have an answer. So we fixed it, badly at first, then properly.
The Boxes That Started It All
Our first attempt was three matching wicker baskets from a shop that shall remain nameless, bought because they looked nice in the photo. They did not look nice on top of the wardrobe. They looked like three wicker baskets balanced on a ledge nobody could reach without a step stool and a small prayer, and within a week one had slid forward six inches and was hanging half off the edge like it was thinking about jumping.
The actual lesson wasn’t baskets or no baskets. It was depth. Our wardrobe top has about 34 centimetres of clearance before it hits the ceiling, and those baskets were 40. We’d measured the width, not the height, which is the sort of mistake that feels stupid in hindsight and completely reasonable at 9pm in a shop with a toddler asking to leave.
What Actually Lives Up There Now
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Flat, labelled, boring boxes. Genuinely boring, and that’s the point. We use four shallow ones, the kind meant for under a bed, and they hold, in order: spare bedding for the sofa bed, decorations we only need for six weeks of the year, a box of cables and chargers that have no home anywhere else in the house, and old photos we haven’t got round to scanning, a project that has now spanned three separate New Year’s resolutions.
The rule we landed on, after the wicker disaster, was nothing goes up there that we need more than four times a year. If it’s something we reach for monthly, it belongs somewhere at actual human height, not somewhere requiring the step stool from the shed and a small act of faith balancing on a wardrobe drawer that definitely wasn’t designed to take weight.
The One Thing We’d Never Put Back Up There
For about eight months we stored a spare duvet up there loose, no box, just folded and shoved along the top like a soft, useless draught excluder. Every time the wardrobe door opened, gravity did its thing and the duvet corner would flop down over the door like it was trying to escape. Our neighbour Marion, round for tea one Sunday, watched it happen mid conversation and just said, “is your wardrobe shedding?” That was the moment we admitted the loose item era was over. Everything now goes in a box with a lid, no exceptions, because a lidless pile up there is just gravity’s plaything waiting for its moment.
We also tried, briefly, decorative crates for a sort of styled look, the kind you see in a catalogue where the top of the wardrobe becomes a display shelf with a plant and a woven tray and something artfully draped. Ours lasted four days before the plant, a fake one thankfully, tipped forward onto our son’s head while he was hunting for a missing shoe under the bed. There is no styled look worth a plastic fern to the skull. Function won. It always does up there, because nobody is standing in that spot admiring the vignette, they’re standing there trying to find spare batteries.
The Actual Space Isn’t The Problem
The real thing we got wrong for years wasn’t storage boxes or basket depth, it was thinking of that space as spare, a bonus, somewhere things could just exist without a job. Once we started treating it like any other storage in the house, labelled, boxed, limited to stuff we genuinely rarely need, it stopped being a source of dread every time we opened the bedroom door and glanced up.
The shoebox is gone now, by the way. The sock remains a mystery. Some things you just have to let go.
If you’ve got dead space above a wardrobe, don’t dress it up, just box it properly, keep it to things you barely need, and for God’s sake measure the height before you buy anything.
