Did you know that every single day in our country, millions of scarves and belts are thrown on floors in the dark corners of closets, marginalized by society?

Even the lucky ones with a place to hang are often forced to share hangers with lots of other scarves… hangers made for CLOTHES.

NOT SCARVES.

There’s a way you can help.

You can build your own scarf and belt storage situation that slides out for easy access, and give the scarves and belts in your life a place to thrive. It’s teaching them how to fish, you know?

This is the slide-out scarf organizer we put in my newly made-over closet (see the before and after here):

And here’s the belt version:

Materials Needed

Slide-out Scarf Organizer

• One piece of MDF or plywood, about 11 inches x 26 inches
• One 26-inch-long piece of 1×2 poplar, ripped to about 1 1/8 inches.
• Two 10-inch drawer slides. (They usually come two to a pack, so one pack. We used these)
• Two or three (or more) Ikea Fintorp rails, or any towel bars
• (Optional) Gold spray paint.

Slide-out Belt Organizer

• One piece of 11-inch-long 1×4 board
• One 3.5-inch-long piece of 1×2 poplar, ripped to about 1 1/8 inches.
• One pack of small cup hooks (The ones we used came in a pack of 40 like this.)
• One 10-inch drawer slide like this.

*Affiliate links

Now before I dive into the how-to, I have to give ALL the credit for the slide-out belt concept to my super-talented friend Sharon at Lilikoi Joy. The idea for the slide-out belt thing was all hers; we just executed it in a different way, and turned it into a scarf holder. Her way is more professional and requires a few more tools than this way, so take your pick of your favorite option. Either way, make sure you check out her post on the idea here!

This is the overall idea: you attach one side of a drawer slide to your closet/wall, and the other side to a board, then put hooks or a rail on the front of the board. The end. Here are the details.

Step 1: Attach your two pieces together

The belt holder is made of the 1×4 board attached with pocketholes (via our handy kreg jig!) to the little face frame piece:

The scarf holder is just the MDF/plywood piece attached to the face frame piece with pocketholes. Very simple:

This step is where my version differs from Sharon’s. She routed out a slot in the back of a board for the drawer slides, and didn’t need a faceframe. That’s a really smart way to do it, but this way works if you want to keep it a little simpler and/or don’t have a router.

Step 2: Paint

Oops. I forgot to take a picture before this step.

Step 3: Attach Drawer Slides to backs

For the scarf holder, you’ll use two drawer slides — one on top and one on bottom.

The drawer slides are easy to attach: you just screw ’em on. The hard part is aligning them to the shelf where you’re installing them, because you screw half the drawer slide onto the board and the other half onto your closet. If they’re not lined up perfectly, it’ll be a no-go.

This was our trick to get them perfectly lined up. We used this little 2-inch-wide board as a spacer. Lined it up with the edge of the board on each end, butted the drawer slide right up against it and screwed it on:

Then we went into the closet and drew a line where we wanted the top of the scarf organizer to be, then lined up our spacer board with that line, butted up the other half of the drawer slide against the spacer board, and screwed it in.

For the belt holder, you don’t have to worry so much about lining things up, because you’re just using one drawer slide. Screw half of it onto your little board and the other half onto your closet.
(We screwed it onto another board so the drawer slide would clear the front of the closet shelves.)

Step 4: Attach hanging gadgets

For the belt hanger, you just screw in the little cup hooks wherever you want. We staggered mine to make room for bulky belts.

For the scarf holder, we screwed on three Ikea Fintorp rails which we cut down a little shorter and spray-painted gold.

There’s nothing magical about the spacing here; it’s really whatever you want. If I’d had more room, I would’ve spread mine out a bit more, but I wanted to fit three rods and didn’t want to hang any rods so low to the ground that the scarves are resting on the shelf below them.

Because that would be heinous, yall.

I used the Fintorp rails because they’re very narrow and I didn’t want to use any kind of towel bars that took up too much horizontal space. If you have the space, I think a wider bar like a towel bar would be a good thing. Totally your call.

Step 5: Slide them onto the drawer slides you already installed and you’re set!

Then have WAY too much fun actually hanging your belts and scarves… because you just gave them meaning and a place to call their own.

You took those scarves off the STREETS, yo. But I think when it’s all said and done, you’ll wonder who really saved who, you know?

Tell it to me straight: what’s your scarf situation? Do you have some rescuing to do?