1. Start with a blank slate
To truly beat the clutter, remove everything from your closet. Everything, including hangers and bins. Wipe all the surfaces with a micro-fibre cloth to remove dust so it’s nice and clean when you put items back into the closet.

2. Decide on a sorting system
There are many ways to sort your clothing within the closet. You could sort things by colour, by article of clothing (shirts together, pants together, etc.) by type of clothing (“work clothes”, “casual clothes”, “party clothes”, etc.), or even sort by outfit. Pick a system that works for you and stick with it. With a sorting system in place, you’ll know where each item will be located when you need it, rather than flipping through the hangers looking for a particular shirt.

3. Store out-of-season items elsewhere
The fewer things you keep in a closet, the easier it will be to keep organized. Keeping out of season clothes elsewhere is a great way to do this. Bulky sweaters don’t need to take up space in your closet during the hot summer months, and shorts and t-shirts don’t need to be in the way during winter. If you have a guest room, put out of season items in that closet, and swap out when the seasons change. If you don’t have an additional closet, bins that slide under the bed are a great place to store out of season clothing.

4. If you need to lose or gain weight to wear something again, let it go.
Clothing that doesn’t fit properly just takes up space in your life. You either don’t wear it, or look and feel awkward if you do. Odds are by the time you change your body shape in order to wear something again, the clothes will be out of season or out of style. Consider donating these items to a local charity or homeless shelter, or try selling them on Kijiji or Craigslist.

5. Use all available space in your closet
Store things vertically instead of horizontally. Instead of spreading your shoes out along the floor of the closet, get a show rack and store them up vertically, and you’ll have more floor space available. You could add additional short shelves in your closet for sweaters and other items that can be stretched out by hanging on hangers. These items can be folded neatly below hanging shirts to maximize storage space.

Remember to use unconventional space too. The back of the closet door can be used to store smaller items. Hang a full-length mirror there, or put up small hooks for scarves, belts, or ties. Muli-tier hangers can store multiple skirts or pants in the space previously taken up by one.

Bonus 6th tip
Remember that the 80/20 rule applies here; you wear 20% of your clothing 80% of the time. When you put your clothes back inside the closet, turn your hangers backwards. As you wear each item, return it to the closet and face the hanger properly. After a month or two, check how many hangers are still backwards. These items can be donated or sold, since you are clearly not wearing them right now.

What is your best closet decluttering tip? Do you have any tricks to share?

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5 More Ways to Clear Closet Clutter

Photo by Anne Norman

Go to your closet. Yes, as soon as you finish reading this. Don’t wait!

Turn all your hangers backwards (over the back of the rod, instead of over the front of the rod). Every last one.

In a month, I’ll post again and remind you to look back in your closet and see exactly how many hangers are still facing the wrong way!

~Thank you all for your patience with my lack of posts during this difficult time. ~

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Reader Challenge: Closet Clutter

Instead, I got rid of two and a half bags of clothes! Yay!
Not quite 3, but I used those big yard waste bags.
Here they are:

This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: Huge Success!

I suppose technically I could have crammed the half bag into the other two, but it’s all jeans so it’s actually pretty heavy. Both of the full bags are full by weight, and adding more would probably tear the bags, and we don’t want that!

They haven’t actually left the house yet (as today was a holiday) but I’ll have my husband take them off at Value Village to donate tomorrow because he’ll have the car.

I also had close supervision to make sure I didn’t try to keep anything I shouldn’t:

Dax looks cranky, but she’s just squinty from the flash.

Remember how I said my dresser was so full I couldn’t fit anything else in it? I completely emptied it! Some of that stuff went into the “keep” pile, but the majority is going straight to charity. I rarely pull things out of the dresser to wear, so following the 80/20 rule I decided that if I hadn’t bothered to dig an article of clothing out the a drawer in a while, I obviously didn’t wear it enough to keep! Out all that stuff goes!
The things from my dresser that I did keep were small, easy to store things, like a few nice pairs of pantyhose and stockings, and my two bathing suits. Despite the horrid weather outside my door lately, it will be summer again eventually!

It feels pretty good to have so much stuff out of my room! It was all perfectly serviceable clothing, it just didn’t fit or I didn’t really like it. Now it will be out of my way for good, and donated to charity so someone else can make use of it!

If you participated in this challenge this weekend, how did you do? Comment and let us know!

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Weekend Challenge: Success!

Apparently, the hoarding part of my brain skims over the fact that since I don’t wear them, I obviously don’t need them (and even if I did need them, they wouldn’t fit right anyway!)

Clutter Fact: I have more clothes than my dresser can fit, so much of my clothes sit on the floor next to it (admittedly, it’s a crummy dresser that doesn’t hold much, the drawers only open half way, and weighs a tonne to boot). It’s ridiculous, and I hate it. It makes the room an instant mess, and the clothes get wrinkled.

This weekend, my personal challenge is to get rid of at least 2 bags of clothing. This should cut it down a bit, and maybe I can wrangle more of the clothes I do wear into the dresser!

Try it too, if you like! Get rid of some of the clothes that you no longer wear. Do it this weekend!

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Weekend Challenge: Get Rid of 2 Bags of Clothes

Of the methods shown, I like the first one the best. Stackable, clear plastic shoe storage boxes seem like a nice, simple solution.

The business about keeping shoe boxes and taking a photo of the shoes inside to paste on the box so you can tell without opening it what pair is inside is interesting, but it seems overly complicated to me. Especially given that if you have a variety of shoes, you’ll have a variety of different sized boxes to try to keep stacked. Tricky.

The first ones in the video (that appear to be these one from The Container Store) can be stacked and just the inside slides out, which lets you remove a pair lower in the stack without having to move all of the boxes above it. With shoe boxes, you’d have to move the whole pile just to get to the ones at the bottom. As I’m sure you’re aware, the more difficult something is to keep tidy, the less likely it will be kept that way!

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Shoe Storage