I have way too many clothes and I can't deny it. As I am not willing to part with any of them, I have to be precise with how I organize my closet to make my mornings run more smoothly.
This means picking out the best closet organizers to help keep my clothes in check. However, I have not always been the best at working out what will work for my small closet, and I have made some mistakes that made getting dressed feel like a battle.
These are the three organizers I grew to hate, and why I replaced them.
Closet organizers that only made my life harder
When organizing a small closet with lots of clothes, the organizers you use make all the difference.
1. Hanging shoe cubbies
Okay, I admit that I didn't technically buy this one, there was one left in the closet when I moved into my house. Nevertheless, I used it for the first few months while I worked out what worked best for my bedroom storage. It is safe to say that this is a home organizer I would never purchase for myself.
I used it for a mix of both shoe storage and some folded sweaters and found that it was impractical for both. Not only were my shoes constantly falling out when I moved the hanging organizer around to reach other clothes, but it put my dirty shoes too close to my fresh clothing for my liking. My sweaters were likewise all squashed, meaning that they also fell out, or were impossible to pull out without multiple sweaters coming out together.
Instead, I now keep my dress shoes in some under-bed storage, such as these under-bed storage bins from Amazon, and my sweaters folded neatly in storage boxes at the base of my closet so they are not squashed or stretched out on hangers.
2. Plastic coat hangers
One of the closet organizers professionals always buy is good-quality hangers made from velvet or wood. After battling with the thin plastic hangers that came with my clothes from the store, I now understand why.
The thin plastic and metal hangers I used to use were forever getting tangled when left on the railing empty, meaning they were tricky to pull out quickly when putting away laundry – infuriating me at the best of times. What’s more, they were too weak to hold anything in shape, especially my thicker and heavier tops and trousers.
Now, I use wooden hangers instead. These take up a little more room in my closet, but I like the sturdiness for keeping my top-quality clothes in shape and the clean look it offers my closet – perfect for organizing a home for quiet luxury.
3. A dresser for inside my closet
Being able to organize a dresser to keep folded clothes is a must to avoid garments overflowing around my room, but putting it inside my closet so that it sat awkwardly beneath my clothes made hanging clothes up more difficult than it needed to be. Many of my clothes were too long, meaning the drawers were blocked or the garments sat pooled up in a heap on top, leaving them wrinkled – preventing me from picking them because I didn't want to iron them first thing in the morning.
The swap involved me downsizing my bedroom storage, which may sound more impractical but actually made storing my clothes easier. I resorted to using just one dresser elsewhere in my bedroom, file folding clothes to save space, and combined my and my partner's clothes into one storage unit, using drawer dividers to keep them visually separate.
Now, the base of my closet is reserved for the odd box of folded sweaters, taking up very little space and allowing my clothes to hang more freely.
FAQs
Are closet organizers worth it?
Although closet organizers might not seem worth the money at first, investing in good-quality hangers, storage boxes, and rails will make getting dressed in the morning a breeze. They not only make your closet neater, helping you to find items more easily when getting ready for the day but also help keep your clothes in top condition, preventing them from becoming misshapen or wrinkled if they fall to the bottom of your closet.
What is the best order to organize closets?
The best order for a closet to be organized is divided up by type. This means keeping all your tops, trousers, sweaters, skirts, and dresses in sections, then subdivided by color, material, or length to make picking out the ideal outfit each morning simpler. Organizing in this way, rather than by just color, will help you locate the exact item you need more quickly, limiting decision fatigue, and preventing you from forgetting about things or thinking you have nothing to wear.
Of course, if you have a little more self-control than me, then you can declutter a closet to make organizing your clothes a little simpler. But for now, at least, I am going to use my new organizers to the max before I consider letting go of a few pieces.
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