6 Keys to an Organized Closet

Organized closets allow you to find all of your personal items with great ease. If your closet could use some re-organizing, here are six key tips to develop a successfully organized closet.

Prioritize Your Clothing

One of the biggest keys to an organized closet is to stay out of it whenever possible. The less often and less deeply you have to get into a closet, the more organized it will stay. Keep seldom-worn items in the periphery of the closet and give the most accessible space to the items you wear most often.

Less is More

Clothes you don’t wear take up space in even the most organized closet. One trick for seeing which clothes can go is to hang each garment backward at the beginning of the season, so the hanger lifts over the back of the closet rod. When you wear a garment, flip the hanger around to the normal orientation. Any garments still on backward hangers at the end of the season can be donated to charity.

Match Your Organizers to Your Habits
Look at your habits and develop or find an organizational system that works with the patterns you already have.  A spiffy shelving system may not change your routine. Take the following into consideration:

• If you pull your necktie off at the end of the work day and don’t want to deal with it again until morning, use a space-saving hanging tie rack rather than a drawer subdivided into individual sections for each coiled-up tie.
• If you kick your shoes off and go, keep them lined up on the closet floor rather than on a shoe rack. 
• If you have an out of sight, out of mind attitude toward mess, use see-through or wire bins to maintain an organized closet.

Unnecessary Hangers

Extra hangers clutter up any organized closet. Take out all the wire hangers. Wire hangers are fine for bringing something home from the dry cleaners or roasting marshmallows over a campfire, but they don’t deserve a permanent home in your closet. The comparatively thin wire doesn’t support garments well for long-term hanging.  Many dry cleaners recycle wire hangers.

Keep only as many hangers in your closet as you have garments to hang. Spare hangers can go in a box on the upper shelves or in another storage area to be put into service when you buy new clothes.

Make it Pleasing to Your Eye

Since the closet is one place other people rarely see, you might be tempted to cut corners and cobble together an organization system out of odds and ends. An attractive system with coordinating containers and hardware, even if it is utilitarian, is more pleasant to look at and use, and that is the biggest key to an organized closet.

Keep the System Going

An organized closet isn’t organized for long if you don’t keep it up. Once everything has a place, make sure articles go back to their place every night.