Much like the Wizard of Oz, I always felt like warning visitors to my humble abode to “pay no attention to the man (or in my case, shoes, laundry and a super sized vacuum cleaner) behind the curtain.” In my last nutshell of an apartment, I hid everything behind voluminous brown shantung drapes.

In my new digs, those same drapes are now being used in place of a bedroom door so I decided to revamp my old three-paneled screen into some badly needed storage solutions.


 I inherited this wood screen from an old TV show I worked on. It used to be covered in a sad Laura Ashley print and it has since gone through several reincarnations over the years: wrapped in green silk velvet, paint, decoupage, coral linen and now in gray and white broad stripes on taffeta silk. I was lucky enough to get the last 6 yards of designer fabric from Geoffrey Beene’s collection at Mood Fabrics in New York (www.moodfabrics.com) --- the same place Project Runway contestants shop at. I stapled gunned all of the fabric onto the boards and finished the edges by gluing gray gros-grain ribbon.

I decided to make my screen multi-tasking so I re-covered the back with muslin shoe bags and a matching laundry bag.  I made sure and secured the sides of the shoe bags with thumbtacks so the shoe pockets would stay taut to the panel. I also labeled the shoe sections: “heels, flats, and misc.” I love the way the labels look. Now, I can store 48 more pairs of shoes!

I also printed out on t-shirt transfer paper the words “laundry” and ironed it onto the laundry bag. Make sure your photocopier can copy the words as a mirror image onto the transfer paper so it reads correctly when you iron it on.

If you have trouble, just let the nice people at Staples (www.staples.com/) do it for you.


Now, go ahead and pay attention behind the screen.  I have nothing to hide and can just relax and channel Dorothy when I say that “there’s no place like home.”