Are You Making Any of These Closet Mistakes?

If you’re like us, you’ve probably been binge-watching shows and reading books on organization from luminaries such as Marie Kondo. While these organizational gurus make it look easy to bring order to a chaotic environment, it’s actually a little harder than it appears.

Probably one of the worst organizational areas for many people is the bedroom closet. After all, you can toss things in there willy-nilly and not have to look at it again. But there are habits you may be doing that are making your closet a disorganized mess.

Here are a few tips to keep your closet organized:

1. You’ve got too much stuff — The biggest mistake for most people is keeping too many items in your closet. If you’ve been watching Netflix’s Get Organized with The Home Edit, you know the first step to any organizing process is to edit. It’s another way of saying, start your process by decluttering. Take all of your clothes and accessories off the racks and shelves and put them in your bedroom. Then sort it into three piles: keep, donate/sell, trash. Once you go through, you’re going to find some real fashion emergencies that you should have never bought in the first place, much less held onto. Get rid of them and see how much room you have left.

2. Place like items together — The best organizational system is to place all of your like items together. Put pants together with pants, dress shirts together with dress shirts, summer blouses together with summer blouses…you get the picture. This creates a neat organizational system and makes it easier to find things.

3. Use the rows appropriately — If your closet has two rows of hanging rods, then chances are you aren’t using them right. Most people put the shirts on the top and the pants on the bottom. (After all, that’s how it goes on our bodies.) Instead, place the shirts on the bottom and the pants on the top. Generally speaking, pants folded on a hanger take up less space than shirts. If you keep the shirts on top, you will be covering up part of your bottom row and making it harder to see and access.

4. Don’t bury things — Make sure that you set aside a specific area for your shoes so they don’t get buried. If you cover these up with luggage and other items, you will (at best) not be able to find them and (at worst) damage them irreparably.

5. Don’t have boxes inside of boxes — One of the biggest mistakes is that you buy boxes to organize your closet and then put more boxes inside of them. Instead, we recommend using clear plastic containers that are labeled with “shoes” or “purses.” This way, you can actually see what you are looking at before you start digging through the boxes.

If you follow these steps, your morning sojourn into the closet to find your clothes will go a lot smoother. And you will have the peace of mind that comes from having an organized closet instead of an untidy disaster area.

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