Organizing Your Master Closet

Organizing your master closet will make getting dressed in the morning easy if you first determine how you decide what you will wear each day.

For instance, I start choosing what to wear by determining what the temperature is going to be that day. With that in mind, I start putting together an outfit based on sleeve length. I tend to run cold and still have Florida blood in me, so it is all about how cold it might be that day. This helps me decide if I am going to wear sleeveless, short, mid or long sleeve shirts.

Once I have picked out my shirt, I move onto slacks vs skirts, jacket and then shoes.

Because this is my decision making process, my shirts are located closest to the inside door of my closet. I choose the shirt and move further into slacks and skirts. Moving past the skirts and slacks are the jackets and shoes. Get the picture?

Everyone makes consistent decisions when they get dressed in the morning. The key is to make note of how you choose and organize your clothing elements in that sequence within your closet. This way, you simply move down the rails picking your clothing elements in the order that most suits your style.

Another way to organize might be by color. My client just yesterday decides what she is going to wear by the color she feels like wearing that day. We organized her clothes into color groups.

Another client organizes his closet by work clothes versus weekend clothes. We have his dress shirts hanging directly over his dress slacks and casual shirts directly over his jeans.

There is no ‘one way’ to organize anything. The perfect way for you to set up your closet might be completely different than the ultimate way for others. The key is to design it according to your own personal decision making process when you get dressed.

(News Transcript)

Host: Let’s put it off! Cleaning and organizing your home. Fox 5’s Shally Zomorodi is in Leucadia this morning showing us tips on how to keep it clean and wow, first up is the closet!

Shally: Hi and good morning everyone. Put your hands up if your house is completely disorganized. Yeah look, all of our hands are up and you struggle with getting your home actually looking nice, looking and feeling good. So this morning we are showing you how to reorganize your home. Obviously you recognize this face, Kathi Burns, founder of Add Space To Your Life. She’s here and we’ve invaded Lisa Knight’s house in Leucadia. We’ve invaded this so we can reorganize your home starting with your closet. What does your closet usually look like?

Lisa: It’s a wreck. There’s usually shoes on the floor, there’s laundry, there’s an ironing board, there’s a vacuum cleaner (a wet/dry vac). There’s just a height of industry in here.

Shally: That sounds like my closet. Alright Kathi, help us, help us! So take us in there, show us what are some really easy tips that people at home can do to straighten things up.

Kathi: Okay well the first thing is you never want anything on the floor. The reason being is that you want to have the floor clean so that you can vacuum. And things that tend to fall on the floor in closets are lost and gone forever and you don’t get them anyhow. So the very thing that I did was pick the pile of shoes up out of the broken basket and put them into a hanging shoe basket. This is the size that works great for gents, for women you can see over here we have the smaller sizes and they work great. It’s a wonderful thing because you can fit ten pairs of shoes in this small amount of this whole space, 4 inches basically across.

Shally: Amazing. Okay what else can we do?

Kathi: That’s the first one. The hamper – I always recommend as soon as I see the hamper lid, I take the lid off because what happens with the lid on top of the hamper, clothes get put on the lid and then the clothes don’t go into the hamper. So it becomes a little holding zone and everything gets piled on there. So if you have a hamper with a lid, I’d say definitely take it off.

Shally: I know a whole bunch of ladies at home going right now, “Yes! Now if we can just get the men to put the clothes in the hamper!”

Kathi: And the kids!

Lisa: The clothes in the hamper is a beautiful thing!

Shally: Alright, got another tip for us?

Kathi: Absolutely! We want to hang slacks with slacks, shirts with shirts, coats with coats. The top pole right here, the top shelf is usually not that functional so what you can do with it is you can stack things like the linens, blue jeans that are folded nicely on top as well as sweatshirts. Sweatshirts are bulky and take up too much pole space anyhow. So that’s what will happen is when it goes into winter you’ll have all the sweaters and sweatshirts on the top shelf.

Shally: Okay, this looks good. Thank you! How do you like your closet? Do you love it?

Lisa: I think it’s exciting!! Thank you Kathi!

Shally: Oh my gosh, wait til we get to the bathroom and kitchen! Okay so up next we are going over to the bathroom. I can’t wait for this, everybody’s bathroom is a mess. You don’t want to miss this. We’ll send it back to you guys.