The Dressing Room. That was one of my first projects when I bought my house. When I met my wife, the biggest step wasn’t the moving-in; it was amalgamating the closets. That was a merger that made me more nervous than buying our first major piece of furniture.

The Dressing Room has been a work-in-progress for a while now. My favourite new project was sparked by a need to properly care for, store and display our combined baubles so that we’d get the most wear out of them, keep them from tangling and avoid those unpleasant – where did you put the ________________ (piece of missing jewellery) conversations.

The wall of jewellery. You can do this yourself!

I decided to use a wall that already had a closet on it and to position the  display space on the same wall to balance and mirror the shape of the closet. It’s tucked behind the entry door of the room, allowing maximum use, without taking up a wall that could be used to place a larger piece of furniture.

First. I measured the closet trim and planned to make an equal-sized frame for the wall-mounted display. I bought the trim, some one inch white strips (the technical name, I’m sure), white finishing nails, and got the saw and hammer from the tool shelf. I also got a protractor (not kidding). I figured out my angles, nailed those suckers to the wall, filled the small gaps, sawed a mis-measured angle (while it was still attached to the wall) and felt very proud of myself as I saw this all take shape.

When I explained this all to my wife, she raised an eyebrow. When she got home from work, I was pleased to show off my finished product. I placed each piece (staggering the horizontal pieces in varying distances to accommodate longer pieces), and put the nails in one at a time.

Voila! No more missing, tangled necklaces.

I am 100 times more likely to wear a necklace and consider it as an option for the day when I can see it. This is literally what ‘shopping your own closet’ looks like.