Our assignment for this weekend is organize your master closet. My husband and I share our closet, so I am going to streamline both of our clothes.
If you are just joining us, we are taking the challenge from 30 Days to a Simpler Life
by Cox and Evatt and also gleaning some hints from Organize Now!: A Week-by-Week Guide to Simplify Your Space and Your Life
. You can check out all the previous days' posts::
Day One Challenge - Fill A Shopping Bag - Here
Day Two Challenge - Clean Out a Junk Drawer or Closet - Here
Day Three Challenge - Form a Buying Checklist - Here
Day Four Challenge - Create a Serene Bedroom - Here
The Challenges are not contingent upon one another so just jump in wherever you would like.
Now we are ready for the Day Five challenge and here is your step-by-step guide from 30 Days to a Simpler Life on organizing the clothes in your closet:
1) Sort your clothes into 3 piles - Recycle Pile, the Ambivalent Pile (read more about this here), and the Love and Wear Pile
2) Put the Recycle Pile into your car to be taken to the local consignment shop to be resold or to be taken to the local charity of your choice, i.e. Salvation Army
3) Place the clothes from the Ambivalent Pile onto wire hangers. Hang them in the back of your closet or in another closet. Practice living without these clothes.
4) Buy enough wonderful hangers to hold the garments in the Love and Wear Pile. Buy them today, if possible and hang up you the clothes you are going to love and keep.
Jennifer Ford Berry, in Organize Now! has another method for sorting your clothes and gives some practical tips for making decisions -
Go through the clothes and pull out everything you can see that:
1) You have not worn in more than one year
2) You do not feel good in
3) Is out of style
4) You just don't like
5) Doesn't fit
6) Is worn out, ripped or stained
She continues:
Remove all of your out-of-season clothes and place them in an extra closet or in a plastic container stored under the bed.
Now empty the closet and lay all the clothes on the bed or floor. Throw away all broken or bent hangers. Once the closet is empty, evaluate the space. Do you need to hang any extra rods, add a belt-and-tie rack or put in new shelves? Make any modifications you need to improve your closet's storage functions.
While organizing your closet, here are some more tips from Cox & Evatt:
1) Expand your closet's holding capacity - instantly!
Hang a space doubling rod. Add a second shelf above the main shelf.
2) Don't scrimp on hangers. Simplicity means having one style of hanger. Not a hodgepodge.
Create a special location for empty hangers at one end of your closet
3) Arrange your clothing inventively.
Arrange clothes by color - warms with warm, cools with cools, neutrals with neutrals.
Arranges clothes by type - pants with pants, shirts with shirts and so on.
Arrange by function.
4) Get your shoes off the floor
Reach up, not down, to get a pair of shoes. If you have a standard closet, place your shoes on a shelf
above the rod, and then build another shelf above them. You can store shoes in their box, which
keeps them from getting dusting. Label the boxes with the description of the shoes.
5) Confront your sock life. Ponder each pair, then edit, edit, edit.
6) Install towel bars on the back of your closet door.
Two towel bars fit nicely on the back of a closet door. Towel bars are great for hanging flat things,
like tights, pants, and scarves. You can also use them for hanging clothes when you are packing for
for a trip or planning an outfit for the next day.
7) Hang a drawstring bag for dry cleaning.
Grab the bag and go to the cleaners without having to search for clothing. To simplify, visit the dry
cleaners the same day each week. Return the wire hangers and ask the clerk to omit the long
plastic bags.
8) Create an Ambivalence Center
Put your ambivalent clothing - clothing you can't get rid of but don't really like - away from clothing
you frequently wear. Put those items in the back of your closet, in another closet, in under-the-bed-
box, or in lidded boxes. After a few months....(make a decision about these items and give them away
or put back in your closet to wear.)
Whether you take Cox and Evans approach or Berry's approach, at this point you should have pared down you clothes and have an empty closet or a streamlined closet. This is the time to sweep and swiffel (or vacuum). If you're really industrious you can even put a fresh coat of paint on the walls.
This is our closet. It's not in terrible shape. The organizing systems are in place. I have just let the clothes get a bit out of hand.
We have a very small master bath, so I store extra toiletries and medicines in our master closet. One of my tasks, today, while organizing our closet is trying to figure out how to better organize all these items.
I will be posting photos of my finished project at the end of the weekend!
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