Ladies, has your closet gotten out of control? Are you left wasting valuable time every day just trying to find the right clothes and accessories? Let alone putting together an outfit that’s perfect for the occasion.
If you’re ready to step up to help your closet stand out, then you might want to embrace some of the following tips for affordable closet organization. Best of all, most of these can be done on a weekend or even one night.
Empty Out Your Closet
It’s nearly impossible to get your closet organized while it’s still disorganized. If you want to truly get out with the old and in with the new, then you need to empty out your closet. This is the ideal time to start pulling out things you no longer wear and donating them or finding some other home for them.
If you do this part of the process honestly, then you are truly going to find yourself with a lot more space to work with in your closet. You might even be able to come up with a good excuse to go shopping for a wardrobe refresh!
Add Some Adjustable Shelves
The truth is, your wardrobe and storage need to change with the seasons. Shelves are a great way to store items in boxes or keep items in small lightweight fabric totes. When you install adjustable shelves with a vertical rail and clip system or even a simple down system, you can maximize the vertical storage potential of just about any closet.
The cost of the adjustable shelf hardware is usually less than $20 for a single set of shelves. Then you have the cost of the shelf itself which can range from $5 to $20 depending on the wood it’s made from.
Pull Down Shelves For Closets With A Tall Ceiling
If your closet has a particularly tall ceiling, you could be staring at a lot of wasted vertical space. In a time like this, you might want to have a pull-down shelf installed. They can come with a spring-loaded mechanism or a mechanical crank to help you raise and lower the shelf with ease.
It’s a great place to put seasonal storage items in boxes or sealable tote bins. If you have an inordinate amount of height available, you might even want to consider adding a hanging rod under the shelf. This lets you hang sweaters, coats, and other seasonal garments when you don’t need them. Yet keep them right at your fingertips for when the seasons make a sudden change.
Fabric Totes Add Color
Fabric totes are a great way to store loose, lightweight items. You can usually find them in dollar discount stores for very cheap. Best of all, they’re collapsible, so you can take them out easily when you don’t need them. They have a simple cardboard base, that you can always reinforce yourself.
Though one of the great things about fabric totes is that you can find them in a staggering array of colors. Many have visually stunning, or even simple patterns that add visual flair to your closet.
Best of all they are super cheap. You can usually get a 12” X 12” fabric tote bin for $2 to $5 per bin. Though there are some more expensive options out there if you want to splurge a little for a fun color pattern.
Closet Organizer Baskets
Let’s say that despite your best intentions, you just can’t get adjustable shelves installed in your closet. There are some older closet systems out there with static shelves that simply make it too hard to get fiddly hardware rails installed.
In a time like this, you don’t have to resign yourself to wasting vertical space between shelves. Swooping in to save the day are wire basket systems. You can install simple, yet elegant slide-out rails underneath mid-level shelves, then slide the wire basket into them. The basket pulls out with ease like a drawer. Perfect for storing lightweight items that need to find at a glance.
A Drawer Divided Can Store More
Abraham Lincoln famously said that “A house divided cannot stand.” Though what he didn’t realize was that drawer dividers are the perfect way to keep your closet and dresser drawers from turning into a bedroom junk drawers.
Larger dividers can be used to separate loose clothing items such as undergarments and socks. You could even use sliding drawer dividers to turn the top drawer of your dresser into a convenient place to organize your everyday jewelry.
Go Deep With Multiple Hanging Rods
If you have a particularly deep closet, you might want to consider offset hanging rods. You can set pole sockets a foot lower and a foot or two deeper in your closet. This gives you extra hanger space for seasonal clothes or just times when you want to have that special outfit close at hand, but you don’t want to hang it on display with the rest of your daily-wear clothes.
Lighten Things Up
If you ask a lot of ladies, they will tell you that one of the things they hate about their current closet is the lack of light. Not only does poor lighting make it hard to find what you want, but it also makes it hard to see colorful clothes as they will look in the real world. Many an outfit has been ruined by accessories that looked like they matched in the shadows of the closet, but clashed in the light of a bright sunny day.
The problem is that a lot of closets are only wired for one or perhaps two light fixtures. In some older closets, this is just a single bulb, dangling on a wire with a pull chain. When it comes to affordable lighting, your budget will be easily blown by calling in an electrician to install recessed lighting or additional light fixtures. Though you don’t have to blow up your budget just to get some more photons in your closet.
Some types of track lighting can be plugged into a wall outlet or an extension cord to add three of four light fixtures to the equation. If you want to keep it even more simple and ditch the potentially ugly cords, take a look at battery-powered LED lights. They are energy efficient and can be placed just about anywhere in your closet with a little contact adhesive or Velcro tabs.
