Attic Closet Ideas

Attic Closet Ideas are a premium in most homes. Our possessions continue to multiply while homes are built with fewer places to put them. Unless the home is custom or built-in storage only, there is never enough closet space or a storage room.

Converting attic storage space into usable living space is a great way to make more usable floor space in the home. At the same time, it also opens the door for adding additional closet space upstairs in the attic. That extra closet space might be used by whoever is occupying the bedroom in the attic, or if there is enough of it, providing space for the family in general.

Use of Space

One key to turning attic space into closet space is to use space that is not usable for anything else. Attic finishes often end up with odd areas that don’t function well as floor space, either because the ceiling height is too low or the floor space is too narrow. Those spaces are usually ideal for building a closet, even a walk-in closet.

Planning on Closet Ideas

Of course, this attic closet idea will usually work out the best if the closet is planned as part of finishing the attic. Areas that work out well for closets might be left out of the attic finish just because they don’t work out well for living space. Making it all part of one big remodeling project will save costs.

Even so, the layout of pretty much any functional attic closet is going to be unusual. Most either end up in the knee wall or with a slanted ceiling. While that is a bit of a challenge from a construction viewpoint, it’s a bigger one from a design one. Trying to make an effective closet without taking away from usable floor space can be challenging.

Closets in Knee Walls

The most common attic storage or closet is a closet in a knee wall. This area usually is not used as living space because of the low ceiling height. But just because it isn’t tall enough for walking in, doesn’t mean the space can’t be used.

Closets in knee walls are usually short due to the roof’s sloping. The big trick in designing them is figuring out where to place the knee wall so the closet can be accessed without people hitting their heads on it. In most cases, that means having a ceiling height of six feet, one foot out from the face of the closet.

Putting a closet in the knee wall usually means adding two knee walls; one for the face of the closet and one for the back. Rarely do people run the cabinet back into the eaves, although that can be done. If a back wall is added in, it needs to be far enough back to leave 24″ of usable storage space.

Another way to do this is to just put a back knee wall in the small closet, with the front of the closet not being a wall but instead treating the entire surface as if it were a cabinet front.

The frame around the doors fills the space between them with plywood rather than drywall. This saves on depth, giving you more usable space in the center of the closet. An entire knee wall can be turned into cabinets, putting doors and drawers one beside the other, much like kitchen cabinetry.

These closets in the knee walls white cabinets can be used for hanging clothes or storing other items. Installing dividers or hooks into the knee wall cabinet can make it ideal for clothes or storing shoes, sweaters, and other things and leaving space for clothes hung on hangers.

Closet Shelving Systems

Many companies make “closet shelving systems,” which provide closet organization for the wide variety of things that people keep in their closets.

While they are not made for use in an attic closet, built-in bench, or built-in shelves with a sloping roof, it’s not all that hard to modify the design, making them usable. All that usually has to be done is cutting off the tops of pieces so that they will match the slope of the ceiling.

Going at the Knee Wall from Another Direction

If the window in the attic room is wide enough, the knee wall can be removed from the wall, making a much more oversized closet, even to the point of turning the cut-off area into a double walk-in closet. The wall can be set so that there is room to walk in the attic closet behind it, with shelves on the room side of the cabinet and a clothes bar on the shorter side, towards the window in the eves.

Even if there isn’t enough room to cut off enough for a walk-in closet, separating off enough space to make an almost full-height closet is not without merit, especially if a small dormer needs to be dealt with.

Dual Attic Closets Ideas

attic closet ideas

Dual closets, with the doors facing each other, can be placed on either side of the dormer. If there’s so much space that it makes the closet too deep for practicality, combine this sort of closet with spaces accessed through the knee wall.

Installing Closet Rods on Sloped Roofs

Installing closet rods on a sloped roof is straightforward, and many ways exist. First, suppose the closet area is divided by vertical partitions. In that case, regular closet hanging rods can be mounted to those partitions, installing the closet rod just like in any other closet. The one big difference is that the closet rod will be extremely close to the ceiling, whereas it would be a foot or more off the floor in a typical closet.

If there are no partitions, brackets for the mirrored closet doors and rods can be mounted directly to the ceiling. There are closet rod supports, designed for use as center helps, being shaped almost like a screw eye but with a flat base to screw through.

The key here is to space the mounting of these supports so that they fall right on the rafters. Then use screws that are long enough to get through the drywall and at least an inch into the wood.

A variant of this, which fits well with modern styling, is to use iron pipe and fittings to make the closet rod, with flanges attaching the rod to the ceiling at the rafter. A short stub of pipe would then attach to the flange, with a T holding the pipe sections forming the closet rod.

Elbows should be used at the ends of the pipe rather than Ts unless it is necessary to have the closet rod extend past the end of the last flange; then, a simple cap can be used. The pipe is strong enough to support clothing hung outside the corner closet between the flanges.

But if it’s Sloping the Other Way?

closet attic ideas

When trying to install closet rods the other way, where the slope is going across the direction of the closet bed and rod, the secret is dividing tiny space between the closet bed and rod into sections. Two or three closet sections can be placed side by side, with dividers in-between. The closet rods can then be mounted horizontally use of closet rod brackets attached to wallers.

The Best – Utilizing a Narrow Attic Closet Ideas

The best attic closets come out by taking spaces in the attic which are too narrow to use as living spaces and turning them into closets. Think of a tiny attic closet or area one can walk down the middle of, with sloped ceilings on either side.

The center area that can be walked walk-in attic storage closet might only be two feet wide, but there’s still a considerable amount of space on either side.

This is easy to access and a ready-made area for a walk-in closet, no matter how deep. Some people have made walk-in closets 20 feet deep in places like this.

Depending on the person’s creativity, the site on either side of the aisle can easily be used for closet rods, shelves, drawers, white cabinets, bins, suitcases, and shoe racks.

One valuable thing that large attic closets and walk-in closets offer the opportunity to do, which most other walk-in closets don’t have, is to have top cabinets and shelves.

Another attic closet idea is this top shelf of drawers, cabinets, and shelving area can be considered the top of a dresser, a great place to put jewelry boxes and other small items that need to be kept accessible while being stored away in the closet.

One of the keys to designing such a space is to see no room as unusable. Instead, the idea is to find some way of making every nook and cranny small attic closet into usable storage space. Ends, where it isn’t practical to put closet rods, can be turned into dressers or shelves for shoes.

Areas in attic closet ideas under dormer windows, which don’t offer enough height for a closet rod, are also ideal for drawers floating shelves. The little angled area above the closet rod can hold a stand, even if it doesn’t seem like the triangular space would provide storage for much. I’ve had a shelf like that in a few attic closet ideas, which became a great place to store my hats.

attic, closet framing

Attic closet framing, Dawn Peterson

Oddball Spaces

Whenever anyone tries to make an attic closet, there will be oddball ideas for spaces to hang something that don’t make sense or seem all that useful. But that’s only true if we’re all thinking about hanging clothing. Most people have lots of other things that they store in their closets.

I owned a home with a large walk-in closet and bathroom, off the main bathroom and in the attic over the garage. The entryway into the walk-in attic closet was an eight-foot-long narrow area with a closet rod on the sloped ceiling.

There was a straight wall across from that closet rod, but it was too close to leave room for shelves. So I put lattice on that wall, making a place for hooks to hang purses.

Purses aren’t the only thing that can be hung on a flat wall like that, where there isn’t room for hanging racks putting shelves. Ties and belts can also be hung with an appropriately made hanging rack or frame. A bunch of hooks or something like a hat rack can be used for hanging necklaces, perhaps even in a decorative way.

In addition to the shelf I mentioned earlier, where I kept hats and accessories, I utilized some of the roof space, making wood racks like the prongs of a fork.

These were mounted to the ceiling, allowing hats with brims to be slipped in with the bill up against the roof.

Mirror for a Wardrobe, Closet Attic Ideas

attic closet ideas
Walk-in closet with only male clothes. Nobody inside

Perhaps one of the best uses for that sloped ceiling space is a mirror for a wardrobe. While it would not give the dresser the same sort of view of the wardrobe that one mounted on the wall would, it would be helpful for quick reference in seeing how an outfit might go together.

Another handy item in this attic closet, if the cabinet is big enough to do it, is to forego the storage space for a short section of the closet and build a bench there instead.

This provides someplace to sit while wearing pants, pantyhose, and shoes. To keep from wasting the limited storage space to add shelves, the seat can lift on hinges, allowing spare blankets to be stored underneath.

It’s even reasonably easy to build a hidden compartment into the attic closet, using the area in the eaves, which is not used for anything else. The trick is to make a door for the site that matches its surroundings in the same color so it doesn’t look like a door.

The back of a cabinet, shelf, or drawer unit offers a great place to do this, where it will be hidden from view, hide from dust in the cracks around the edges of the door and still be relatively accessible when needed.