One of my favorite things is clothing organization. I’ve organized my clothing so much that I was able to fit into a small 2×4′ closet now. I love organizing a closet because it’s such a high-use space that many people tend to close the door and forget about it. There’s a high potential to make it a functional and enjoyable space.
People who love clothes and people who hate clothes often end up with too many. Both cases can make it hard for these groups because they both have reasons to have trouble picking or discarding favorites. It’s surprising but if you like none of your clothes, it’s still hard to figure out what to keep. If you love everything, it’s hard to figure out what you shouldn’t keep.
I’m someone who doesn’t like clothes, you can read my journey with decluttering and organizing clothing here.
Clothing Organization Project Starting Point:
In this post, I’d like to talk through the other side. This is about someone who LOVES clothes and loves having a variety of clothes. This client loves clothes. She was in pageants and was an avid runner. She recently lost weight and hadn’t yet removed larger clothes.
The challenges:
As far as I know, everyone has a change in their lifestyle that impacts their clothing. It might be when going through pregnancy or perhaps just weight fluctuations and lifestyle changes. There was a time when I wore formal business attire to work. Then I had to wear a uniform. Now my wardrobe is up to me again.
I held onto the formal business attire as I didn’t know how long I’d be at this job. In the meantime, my entire body shape changed from weight gain and loss. My tailored clothing, no longer fit. I also did formal speaking events infrequently. All these unknowns make it challenging.
It’s useful to reevaluate how well-matched our wardrobe is to our lives. If you’d like help with figuring this out, I write about my experience going through the book “The Curated Closet” in a past blog. There is also a woman who specializes in helping women figure out their wardrobes and she offers classes.
Objective: Project Goals
I was hired to get all the clothing to fit back into their containers which included two dressers, a trunk, and two walk-in closets. These spaces were completely available to her for all her clothing, which she loves! She might wear multiple outfits a day and go to a variety of special events.
Items were being hung in doorways and were falling onto the floor, so the goal was to make the space functional again.
Steps for Decluttering:
If you tend to have trouble finding clothing that you like, follow my off-size/off-season bin post. However, if you tend to easily find new items and can afford to replace them, start by donating everything that doesn’t fit and you can easily replace it. Decluttering is key to clothing organization. Don’t skip it.
Limit the things you keep in another size to items you love and couldn’t easily replace and only one size off from what you fit now. Unless you are actively working to lose weight, one size will not be needed or cover a few years. For anyone who has been maintaining for years and the item can’t be tailored, let it go now.
Clothing Organization: Bounding by Category
I prefer to identify each category of clothing the client needs to keep and limit it to a particular area. We also decided where in the house to keep each type of clothing. In this example, formalwear and jeans were kept in the gym’s walk-in closet.
We also designated a part of the spare closet for off-season coats that could be swapped with summer dresses.
Workout clothes were bound to the walk-in closet’s dresser by tanks, t-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, shorts, leggings/sweats. Then all the sports team wear was designated a space along with the seasonal Christmas party clothes (aka ugly sweaters). Then casual tops, with summer tops below. All were designated to part of the clothing rack and we got like with like as we went.
We cleared the floor first by finding things to remove from the racks and drawers to make space for what she still wanted to keep from the floor. Most often, the items in your way are the ones that you wear the most. So lots of these items she wanted to keep but we had to clear the floor to move around.
We tried to add the ones she wanted to keep to the rack, even in the doorway temporarily. Then we worked on the racks from left to right removing only items she didn’t want and putting the others right back where they were. In the space that we cleared at the end of each rack, we then added in the items from the floor that she wanted to keep trying to get like items together as we went on only the rod we’d already decluttered.
Then we moved to the upper rack left to right. Then we cleared the doorways and anywhere that clothing was not designed to be per the closet layout.
With drawers, we pulled all of it out and the client sorted out what didn’t fit or she didn’t want anymore. Then I put back her favorites first and then she let go of anything that couldn’t fit into the space. Occasionally, we traded similar items as we found ones she liked more. In her dressers, I folded in Marie Kondo’s style so she wouldn’t have to dig through everything to find exactly what she wanted.
This closet had limited space for shoes, so we had to add bins by category and designate a lower rack space for shoes instead of clothing. We moved the less used shoes to the spare closet and she parted with anything she wouldn’t wear anymore.
Clothing Organization Project Wrap-up:
Clothing and accessories were all we tackled in three spaces: the bedroom, the master walk-in closet, and the guest walk-in closet. All the clothing fit into the spaces as designed, with new space for shoes. Each type of clothing had a designated part of the closet.
How long did it take & How much was given away:
The bedroom dressers, nightstands, chest, and guest walk-in closet were completed within 10.5 Hours. The master walk-in took 13.5 Hours. The entire clothing organization project generated combined trash and donations of 48 garbage bags.