Reclaim Your Closet! Easy Ways to Give Your Closet a Makeover
Organization guru shows you how to unclutter, and make over your closet.
Jan. 7, 2010— -- When you open your closet door, do you worry about an avalanche of stuff hitting you on the head? The closet is one of the biggest organizational challenges a household can face.
Organization guru Julie Morgenstern, author of "Organizing from the Inside Out," gave one mom's cluttered closet a complete makeover and appeared on "Good Morning America" to tell you how to reclaim your closet.
Morgenstern's Organization Tips
First, decide what stays and what goes. Come up with criteria so you can decide what to get rid of: Ask yourself what clothes you need in your life and what clothes don't match your life right now.
Use a giveaway box, a throwaway box and a "belongs elsewhere" box for items that should go in another part of the house. Don't take those items to the new location, as you'll get distracted. Just put them in the box until you're done.
Group clothes outside the closet before loading them back in. Separate clothes according to your lifestyle. One way that works is weekend items, work items, evening items.
Make the best use of your space. Inside the closet, group long-hanging and short-hanging clothes separately to open up floor space. Then, you can fit a shoe rack in the extra space.
Invest in a new set of hangers that is uniform and slim. Not only do they save precious space, but the look makes your closet more approachable. You can store unused hangers at the bottom of the closet instead of leaving them on the rod, which eats up precious space.
Assess how your closet door works for you. Trifold doors don't let you hang things on the back of a closet door. Instead, opt for hinged or French-style doors that open outward and allow you to hang hooks and other organizational/storage tools on the back of them.
Use shelf-dividers and shelf boxes, available at Organize.com, to store T-shirts, sweaters and accessories.
Shelf dividers are an inexpensive way to keep your stacks of sweaters separated, making it easy to collect things and put them in their proper places.
Shelf boxes function like drawers. You can pull them down, get what you need and put them back up. They're a great way to store seasonal summer stuff in the back in winter, and then switch it up when summer rolls around again.
Use stick-on lights and a stepstool to help you see inside your closet.