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Organizing Your Clothing A last minute crisis kept you from getting dressed leisurely for the meeting. It's time to leave and you still can't find the shirt that matches the rest of your suit. Your options are to be late again or wear the shirt with the stain and hope no one will notice. Neither is acceptable. Stress builds. Organizing your clothing no longer looks like the waste of time you once thought it was. Organizing clothing follows the same process as any other organizing project: deciding the goal, sorting, categorizing and storing. The goal for most people is to find the clothing they need before they are late for work or the school bus rounds the corner. To reach that goal, invest the time to sort through your clothing. The average dresser should take less than an hour, the average closet less than two, time that will be repaid repeatedly. Pick up each piece of clothing and decide if you should keep it or not. Does it fit? Do you like it? Is it comfortable? Do you wear it? If the answers are no then you should probably discard it. What's that? You received it as a gift or you paid a fortune for it? Get rid of it anyway, but don't just throw it in the trash. Friends and family usually love hand-me-overs, there are plenty of consignment shops that make it easy for you to recoup some of your investment or you can give it to charity, with possible tax advantages. Goodwill, Salvation Army, Purple Heart and religious and civic thrift shops accept used clothing to resell and will give you a receipt so you can deduct the value of the donated clothing on your tax return. You will determine the value to write on the receipt. The pieces you keep will be further sorted according to use. Unless you have the room to store everything in one area, off-season clothing should be put in a different place. Transparent plastic containers are ideal. Buy ones that you can lift when full or you won't use them. Cedar blocks, herbs, fabric softener sheets, wrapped soap bars or sachets can be added to keep musty odors away. Remember to label the containers before you store them. Current-season clothing will go back into your dresser or closet, but divided according to use, not type. All pants are not created equal. Even if they are both shirts don't store your button-downs with the shirts you wear to work on the car. Hang the dress shirts, drawer the t-shirts. Consider putting folded items in the drawer's shingle-style so you can see all your options when you open the drawer. Play clothing goes in a separate area from the beaded evening dress. Undergarments, pajamas and socks are fine grouped near each other because they are the first and last things you dress with each day. People tend to jumble these together in drawers, which is ok if that's your preference. Ultra neat is not the goal, quick retrieval is. Baskets within the drawer can ease separation of smaller items. A few simple changes to your closet layout can a lot of space. By reinstalling the top rod higher and adding a lower rod, you can double your storage area. Or a shorter bottom rod attached to a wooden divider adds more room than just one rod, but still allows you to hang long items in the same closet. There are inexpensive vinyl-coated hanger arrangements that hook on the top rod and have an adjustable horizontal rod where the second rod would be that will accomplish the same objective. Mail order catalogs and stores are full of products for increasing shelf space, adding hooks to hang things on, boxes and racks to store accessories and shoes and dividing shelves so stacked clothing does not become jumbled. The Container Store, Hold Everything, Lillian Vernon, Get Organized, Stacks and Stacks and many other companies make the job easier. Call 1-800-555-1212 for the toll free numbers and ask for catalogs. (Don't forget to call and ask to be taken off their mailing list when the project is completed. Like unmatched socks catalogs beget catalogs, but that's another article.) When you're finished organizing your clothing getting dressed on time will go more quickly and you won't have to choose between being late and looking less than your best. Home | Services | Ask | Press | Resources | Free Forms
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