5 Tips for Organizing Your Closets and Dressers

With summer coming to an end, people are looking ahead to the return of cooler weather. As the time comes to put away the shorts and sundresses and break out the sweaters, it’s a good time of year to start thinking about reorganizing your dressers and closets. By keeping a few simple ideas in mind, even the most biggest wardrobe can be easy to keep in order.

Clear Out What Isn’t Being Worn

It’s much easier to keep your clothes organized when you don’t have so many clothes to keep track of. Before you start trying to reorganize your closet and dresser, look for ways to thin things out. Of course, setting aside clothes that no longer fit or that you otherwise don’t wear anymore to either sell or give away is an excellent way to start, but it’s not the only way to cut down on things. Do you have clothes that need to be repaired or taken to the dry cleaner? Set those aside from the rest of your clothes as a reminder to have them taken care of. Putting out-of-season clothing into storage during the off season will also help.

Group Similar Items

One of the most effective ways to easily find what you’re looking for is to keep similar items grouped together — T-shirts with T-shirts, sweaters with sweaters, pants with pants, etc. Or another option would be to keep things grouped together by occasion, like clothes for work, clothes for special occasions, and workout clothes. Regardless of how you choose to group your items, it’s a good way to make sure you always have some idea of where a particular item of clothing is.

Shelving

Closets commonly have one long shelf running above the rail, but what if you could use a little extra storage space? Not all types of clothing do well on hangers (and might not easily fit in drawers) or you might need an option to store things like handbags or shoes. The Shelving Store recommends wall-mounted shelving, wire shelves, or other modular shelving for use in closets. These types of of shelves can fit in a wide variety of closets and can easily be adjusted to any height you need them to be.

Maximize Your Space

If you have a small closet, there are plenty of ways to make the most of your available space. Over-the-door organizers are a very popular choice for closets and while they’re very commonly used for shoe storage, they can be used to store lots of other things like T-shirts and scarves. Cascading hangers can help make better use of the hanging space in your closet since they allow you to hang multiple items while only one hanger takes up space on the rail. While you can buy cascading hangers, an easy DIY way to get the same effect is to use soda can tabs, like seen on LifeStorageBlog. As for dressers, using the KonMari folding method can help you fold clothes more efficiently so you can make better use of the space in your drawers.

Divide and Conquer

While larger items of clothing can be difficult to store, small items like scarves, camisoles, socks, tights, and children’s clothing can have their own challenges. Drawers full of these sorts of smaller items can easily get cluttered, tangled, and jumbled. Look for drawer organizers and dividers to help keep these sorts of things in order. You should be able to find them at any store that sells home storage tools, but there are ways to make your own dividers. The Homes I Have Made has a tutorial for making drawer dividers out of cardboard.

These tips can give you a big start in getting your closets and drawers in order, but if you still have a lot of extra clothing, don’t be afraid to call a friend to help you out. Sometimes, it can be hard to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. Having someone who doesn’t have a connection to your belongings can help you thin things out by providing an impartial opinion on what should stay and what should be given away.