Your wardrobe and
accessories have been purged so that what remains projects your personal style
and brand beautifully. You’ve compared your closet space to the volume of your
wardrobe and picked up some tools to maximize the use of available space. Now
it’s time to place items in your closet and discuss maintaining the order in
your closet.
Sort Your Clothes
Before placing items into
the closet it is useful to sort them into categories. One way is to categorize wardrobe
pieces by function. Most wardrobes have items that fit different functions such
as work, casual, workout, and formal. Gather items that have the same function
together. Grouping items this way makes it easy to dress for each function. Continue
to sort each function by the different elements: shirts, skirts, pants, dresses
and jackets. Large wardrobes may even benefit from further sorting each element
by color or style (long sleeve versus short sleeve, for example).
Frequency of Use Determines Location
One of the maxims of
organizing is
Frequently used items need to be very
easily accessible.
Translating this maxim to
your closet means that the most frequently used clothes are placed front and
center. For most people’s wardrobes, work and casual clothes are the most
frequently used so they should be placed at the front of the closet. Using a bar doubler provides a way to
store outfits the way they’re put together; that is, shirts are on the top bar
and bottoms on the lower bar. Owners of large wardrobes might like to sort each
category of clothes from dark to light or by style. For items that are used
everyday – a robe or a hat for example – it may be easiest to just use a hook
on the inside of the door.
Items that are used infrequently
can be stored in the rear of the closet. If your closet is tiny, storing
infrequently worn items in another closet will prevent crowding your primary
closet. Generally speaking, it is easier to find things in an un-crowded
closet. Another strategy for
reducing the contents of your primary closet is to store off-season items in
another closet.
The previous post outlining
steps two and three of organizing your closet explained how a closet can be
created by cordoning off an area of a room or by turning an unused room into a
walk-in closet. If you lack an extra room or an extra large room, portable closets
are available. These can be placed in the laundry room, attic or basement where
they will store off-season apparel or infrequently worn items.
Of course closets hold more
than hanging clothes. A narrow but tall shelving unit is ideal for holding
folded clothes and purses because everything is accessible. I hope found the
easier things are to get to, the easier they are to put away.
Make It Easy And Improve Maintenance
This is another maxim of
organizing. Eliminating steps and making things visible are two important
strategies for making things easy.
I like open
bins to hold small items – no lids to fuss with. When possible I prefer to
use transparent containers. The secret weapon to keeping everything straight is
to label everything. In fact the closet bar can even be sectioned off and
labeled by using a product called Simple Division.
Labels eliminate guesswork. To make it a little easier to find an empty hanger,
I suggest putting all the empty hangers at the end of the bar or on a wall
hook.
One of the big obstacles to
keeping the closet organized is practice of clothes dumping. Often the
intention of dumping is to keep clothes that have been worn away from the clean
clothes in the closet. However if the worn clothes are so dirty that they might
contaminate the items in the closet, then they should be cleaned. On the chair
or the floor the item becomes wrinkled and clutters the room. Clothes dumping
doesn’t solve a problem. It creates a bigger one. Hang worn items in the
closet. Trust your nose and eyes to tell you when something needs to be
cleaned.
Plan on spending a few
minutes every week to keep things orderly. Find time to tidy things up in the
weekly schedule – perhaps when the laundry is being done. It takes much less
time to maintain organization then it does to start from scratch.
No comments:
Post a Comment