Organise your wardrobe and store clothes properly

Is your wardrobe bursting at the seams? Are you struggling to decide what to wear today because of all the clothing choices – have you forgotten what clothes you even own? If this sounds like you, there is no better time than now to make a change. As our clothing requirements undergo seasonal changes, we should make use of this transition to sort, organise and store our clothes properly.

With this 8-step plan, keep the potential wardrobe chaos at bay:

Step 1: Plan your organisation system

Before you begin re-sorting your wardrobe, you should consider what your organisation system should look like. What do you need a system for? Only if you know exactly where you keep which clothes, will you be able to find them under time pressure in the morning before work. Think carefully about the storage location for the following items of clothing:

Clothes that you wear regularly
Clothes that you rarely need
New clothes that you really want to wear
Clothing you have already worn, but would like to put on again before it goes in the wash
New shoes and frequently worn shoes
Rarely worn shoes

Do you share a closet with your partner or a family member? Then think about how best to divide the wardrobe into areas for each person. Also, consider whether you want to sort your clothes into specific categories, such as colour, type or occasion.

Step 2: Prepare your clothes

Have you thought of a system that fits your living situation perfectly? If so, now is the time to prepare your clothes. Firstly, you should put clothes that you haven’t washed for a long time in the washing machine. Dirty clothes quickly transfer their smell to other items. Then, you can start folding them or hanging them up on hangers. You should also clean your shoes before storing them. Top tip: you can remove unpleasant odours by putting tea bags in your shoes. If you want to store clothes or shoes in boxes, e.g. because you don’t need them every day, you should always label the storage boxes. This way you can tell at a glance whether the clothes are intended for winter, sports or rainy weather.

Step 3: Storing your clothes properly

Now it is time to sort your clothes. Be especially accurate in this step and stick to your planned system to prevent chaos from breaking out again immediately. Follow these tips and keep things tidy:

Stow items of clothing that you use frequently at eye level. This way you avoid having to constantly reach to the top shelf or dig into the bottom drawers.
Clothes that crumple up quickly should be hung on a hanger. Leave ample space between the individual garments.
Do you keep underwear and socks in a large drawer? If so, use boxes that separate the drawer into separate compartments.
Do you have lots of items of clothing that you can only wear in one season? To give you a little more space in your wardrobe, you can use storage boxes to keep your unused, out of season clothes under the bed, in the basement, or in the attic.

Step 4: Protect your clothes

Even if your clothes are now nicely arranged, they are still far from being protected.

A big problem with clothes that you do not use regularly, is dust. For shoes and clothes that you can fold, closable boxes are a good way to protect them from dust. Evening dresses and suits are best kept in garment bags.

Lockable and sealed boxes not only protect against dust but also against odours and moths. Of course, you cannot store all your daily clothes this way. Hang up small lavender bags to make your clothes smell good and prevent small moth holes.

Do you keep clothes from other seasons in the cellar or the attic? Unfortunately, this is not a practical method of storage. Besides the dangers of vermin, dust and unpleasant odours, there is also potentially high levels of humidity which could make your clothes mouldy. Therefore, make sure that the boxes have a well-closing lid – use boxes with a rubber seal, as they can be closed with complete airtightness.

Step 5: Check your clothes from time to time

Do you happen to have ten minutes? If so, take a look in your closet or wherever you keep unworn clothes and check against the following criteria:

Are there any clothes that you no longer wear?
Are all items sorted correctly?
Have you found clothes that you forgot about and wish to wear again?
Do you have to wash or iron some items of clothing because you cannot wear them in their current condition?

Step 6: Re-sort clothes regularly

After some time, have you realised that your chosen system of organisation is not for you after all? No problem, just adapt it again to your needs. The perfect time for this is the transition between winter and summer when you have to put your stored clothes back into your wardrobe.

To make this as quick as possible, you can use a practical system of organisation. Instead of storing all your clothes together in one big box, you should sort the clothes by category into different boxes and label them accordingly. At the beginning of the season, you can take the stacks of clothes out of the boxes and put them back into your wardrobe.

Step 7: Find your clothes again at any time

Stored garments

When you take last season’s clothes out of the cellar, you are often taken aback, having completely forgotten which pieces of clothing you even own. To avoid accidentally buying everything twice, you should get an overview of your stored clothes. The best way to do this is to use transparent and labelled storage boxes for storage.

Within the wardrobe

Even the wardrobe can quickly become a jungle full of surprises. You’ve already taken the first step to defeat the chaos by sorting by category. If you also use boxes here, you can label them like in the basement or document them with AppMyBox. A little tip to make getting dressed early in the morning even faster is to prepare your outfits on Sunday evening for the whole next week. Alternatively, you can do this every evening for the following day. You will notice how much time you suddenly have before work in the mornings.

Step 8: Find the perfect solution for your everyday life

You can plan and sort as much as you like, but in everyday life, your organisation can suddenly become completely impractical. For example, do you need a chair all the time to get to a piece of clothing? Then rearrange these clothes to your eye level. Or, do additional T-shirts fall out of the compartment when you only want to take one out? Just reshuffle things and hang up the T-shirts with hangers instead.

There is a solution to every problem, so don’t lose patience! Simply keep adapting your wardrobe according to your changing lifestyle.