For Your Residence October 19, 2018

10 Easy Ways to Organize Your Closet

If you’re like most people, your closet is one of the last areas to get the attention it deserves, when it comes to home organization. Sure, with the kitchen and the bathroom, it’s a no-brainer – unless you’re really into mildew odours and attracting bugs. But, it seems like you just never really seem to get around to tackling the closet (again). Consequently, there may be some major indicators that your closet needs an intervention:

You find it easier to buy a new thing, instead of looking in the closet for the existing version;

You’re building up piles of items around the house that theoretically belong in the closet, but there just isn’t room anymore;

You’re using external wardrobes or clothing racks as a closet addition or (worse) a total replacement.

If this sounds familiar, you probably have a closet crisis on your hands. You may have spent months or years avoiding the issue, but as you’ve discovered, it only gets worse over time! To restore a healthy relationship with this all-important storage space, you’ll need an enlightened approach to closet maintenance. This means decluttering, moving things around, and more critically, optimizing the way you use the space. To help rehabilitate your closet, here are ten easy and affordable hacks that let you get things back on track.

1. Organizer baskets.

These come in all sizes, shapes, and colours, so you’re bound to find baskets that match your tastes, as well as fit nicely onto your shelves. If you get sturdy ones, you can stack them up like boxes.

2. Towel bars and hooks.

Although you normally wouldn’t associate this with a closet space, a towel bar is a great way to store scarves and neckties without wasting a hanger. You can use durable coat hooks to hang bags, head gear, and belts on the back of the closet door.

3. Extra hanger bar.

This is exactly what it sounds like – it’s an additional hanger bar that hangs from the original one, increasing the space available. This is a handy extension for shorter items like shirts, folded pants, or skirts.

4. Additional shelving.

If you have the room, mount an extra shelf or two above the hanger bar, or on the sides of the closet. This makes a good space to keep items neatly stored yet out of the way, and off the floor.

5. Shoe organizers.

Say goodbye to the ugly shoe jumble! A shoe organizer can be easily attached to the back of the closet door, so you can stack your shoes in neat pairs, without cluttering the interior.

6. Shelf dividers.

Get these to create unique storage spaces on your closet shelf. This helps you separate items and keeps piles neatly stacked, without spillage or collapsing.

7. Hanging organizers.

Made from cloth or plastic, a hanging organizer can be hung from the hanger bar. It will automatically give plenty of new cubbyholes to stash items you don’t want to hang, like sweaters, jeans, or extra household linens.

8. See-through containers.

When your organizer containers are transparent, it just makes it that much easier to find what you want at a glance. You can safely eliminate the hassle of opening each one and digging through it to find things. The big advantage here, like the baskets, is size variety and stackabilty.

9. Clean floor.

One of the worst closet failures is the cluttered floor. This not only makes it difficult to find what you want, but it actively discourages cleaning out the closet altogether. Not to mention that a pile of stuff sitting on the floor eventually becomes nothing but a big dust magnet!

10. Offsite storage.

Virtually every closet contains seasonal or seldom-used items that you really don’t need in the house all year round, anyway. Sometimes the best way to keep a closet neat and organized is to make enough room for the stuff you only use on a regular basis. For the rest, you can put it away offsite, like in your self-storage unit.

Once you’ve got the supplies to revamp the space, you’ll need to create a few new rules to keep things organized. For example, it makes sense to store everyday items at eye-level, and to put the rest on other closet shelves more out of sight. Get into the habit of folding or reboxing things to keep them tidy, and try colour-coding your items to find them easily at a glance. Avoid the temptation to store things on the floor again to make vacuuming a cinch moving forward.

In the end, you’ll congratulate yourself for creating a storage space that you can be proud of. Hey, you can even show it off to your friends, and then share the “secret” of how to become a closet-organizer guru (or just keep it to yourself and bask in the envy, instead). Either way, your physical closet will no longer be a skeleton in the proverbial one. Nope, nothing to see in there, except neat rows and piles and bins. As a cool bonus, you just might have the motivation to organize the rest of the house, now that you have a knack for it!

De-Clutter Your Closets by Donating to the Kidney Clothes Program!