Closet Organizing Tips

Organizing your closets can be an intimidating project, especially if your stuff is absolutely overflowing the space you have. But it doesn’t have to be a miserable experience if you approach it with a bit of planning and a sense of fun.

We recommend starting with a couple of boxes or bags and plenty of empty space around you to work in as you remove items from your closet. If you just start randomly pulling things out of your closet, you’ll never know if you’ve looked through everything. Start at one end and work your way to the other end. This way you can see how much you’ve been through and how much more time it’s going to take to get to the end of the pole. Remember, we wear 20% of our wardrobe 80% of the time. The rest of our clothes rarely, if ever, get worn at all. You can gain a lot of storage space back by giving up the items that have only been worn once and are unlikely to ever be worn again.

Take each item off the rod to determine whether it stays or goes. If you’re sure you want to keep it, slide it down to the end, where you’ve got the ‘keeping’ clothes accumulating. Anything you want to discard goes in a bag or box allocated for contribution to your local favorite charity.

What about those “iffy” items? What should you do with the pants you love but are too small to fit in? What about out of season clothes? Depending upon the size of your closet, you may want to transfer any out of season garments to boxes or bags out of the bedroom until it’s time to rotate your wardrobe. As for that second wardrobe in a smaller size? Give it to charity. If your New Year’s resolution was to get back in shape to fit in that wardrobe, great! But a better reward than climbing into that smaller wardrobe is to buy a new one when you take off the pounds. Think how much fun it will be to shop for your reward! In the meantime, you’ll have oodles more space in your closet.

Now comes the fun part: putting everything away. Of course, we think the best way to maintain an organized closet is to have us design and install one of our custom systems, which divides the space up into easy-to-manage sections. But there are many ways to keep a traditional closet space in order. You have to think about how you’ll best use the space with your current wardrobe.

Start with your hangers. Whether you prefer wood or plastic hangers, choose just one type to hang in your closet and discard the others. This selection will go a long way towards maintaining order in the abyss. And have all your hangers facing the same direction. Next, divide your wardrobe into sections for leisure wear and work wardrobe. This may mean putting together all your long shirts, then the short sleeve shirts. If you store some pants over the hanger and some by the cuff, then don’t mix them together. The same goes for shorts and pants. If you store both on hangers, keep them in separate sections. You’ll start to see clearly separate sections of your closet begin to emerge in an organized fashion.

Within each section reorganize your clothing from light to dark. By maintaining your clothes not only in sections by type, but also by color, you establish a permanent niche for each item. We tend to begin cluttering because we don’t see a permanent place to keep things. When you bring your laundry back upstairs to put away, it’ll be much easier to find each item’s home if you know the light blue shirt goes next to the other aqua-colored shirt. Otherwise you just start putting things back altogether in the middle of the pole, and the clutter starts all over again.

And what do you do with shoes and sweaters? In our closet organizers, we design the customer’s space for shoes to be stored out of boxes. We also encourage the use of angled shoe shelves to make sure the shoes are visible at all levels. Like everything else in the closet, if you can’t see it, you won’t use it. To that end, Closet Oasis promotes shoe and sweater storage neatly displayed on shelving or racks. It doesn’t matter if you prefer to store your shoes toe or heel facing front, but if they’re all in a jumble or in boxes on the floor, they’ll never be used. Choose wisely and get rid of the overflow. After all, what fun is it to buy $400 Manolo Blahniks if you can’t find them?