A place for everything and everything in its place
Closets are important. They fulfil a very necessary role in a space, whether it be an entryway or in a bedroom. But when they’re disorganized, they’re completely dysfunctional.
Still, who wants to organize a closet? Professional organizers do, that’s who! And it seems that each has a preferred method of giving order to these modest storage spaces.
Allison Weigensberg of Everything In Place, a mother of young children, follows a few simple, systematic steps.
“First you want to sort all the ‘ like’ stuff together — so all of your jeans, sweaters, tees, and seasonal stuff,” she explained.
“It can be difficult to get rid of things, but when you see you have 20 of something, it’s easier to pare down, which is the next step. After decluttering, you want to put it all back.”
Weigensberg favours certain organizational products when it comes to reassembling a closet. The most important thing is to try and make use of all the unused space.
“Hooks and hangers that will ( accommodate) multiple items are ideal,” she said, as well as using the floor space — “but in an organized way with bins and maybe a shoe organizer, as well as lower and upper shelves with bins and baskets that can be rotated by season.”
Mylène Houle Morency of Zen: Organisation familiale also likes to use as much vertical space as possible.
“I’m a huge fan of Ikea closets,” she said, noting that they ’re extremely cost- effective.
“I’ve done a lot of research on there, and the Ikea setups use space all the way up to the top, so you can do as many as three different rows of clothes.”
Morency also likes to use drawers in closets.
“Use see- through drawers so you can see what’s in them; use the top space for clothes that are out of season and then you can rotate.”
This is a much more efficient system than storing out- of- season clothes elsewhere.
“I tend to find that customers who keep their stuff in the basement, for example, will often forget about them,” she said. “Once you start storing things away, you end up forgetting them.”
Like any organizer, Weigensberg loves a good labelling system.
“Label the stuff you put away. If you have pretty bins on top of the closet that aren’t accessible, you don’t want to have to take them all down to find what you’re looking for. A label eliminates that extra work.”
If two people are sharing a closet space, with different sizes and styles of clothing, rod dividers are the answer. “You can put them on and label them and they separate stuff.”
Finally, “live with it for a while,” Weigensberg said of the reorganized closet. “Sometimes we have this idea of what we want for a certain space, but it doesn’t always work with the way we live.”
A closet’s main purpose is to offer efficient storage. Without the efficiency, it’s just a haphazard catch- all.
By sorting its contents and incorporating a few of the handy organizational products that are currently available, a closet can be converted into the functional space it was always meant to be.