How to Organize Your Closet in 2 Hours or Less!

Last Updated on November 23, 2017

Get ready. I am going to teach you how to organize your closet in less than 2 hours! Why? Because if you want to save your sanity, you need a well-organized closet. A well-organized closet will save you significant time and money. How? Well, when you can find what you are looking for quickly and easily, you save time. And you save money because when you can see all of the clothes that you have, and you get rid of everything you don't wear, you stop feeling like you “don't have anything to wear.” Hence, you will spend less money on clothes. AND, when you take the time to hang neatly and fold your clothes in an organized closet, your clothes will last longer (translation, save even more money)!

Organizing a closet is really easy, you just need to set aside the time to do it! This step-by-step guide for how to organize your closet will take you a couple of hours to complete, but will save you LOADS of time in the long run…pinky promise!

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Before you get started, I HIGHLY recommend that you purchase matching wood hangers for your closet. We purchased all of ours at Ikea several years ago. Ikea sells great quality wood hangers at a fantastic price (trust me, I searched high and low for the best deal and Ikea had it)! If you don't have an Ikea near you, there are lots of affordable wood hangers on Amazon as well.

Okay, before I teach you how to organize your closet, let me show you what our closet looked like BEFORE we got started. Yikes.

WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!

How To Organize Your Closet

1) REMOVE EVERY SINGLE ITEM FROM YOUR CLOSET–clothes, shoes, hangers, boxes. Everything. This step is crucial. Choose an areas to place all of the contents of your closet. It could be your floor or your bed or both! As it happens, we used our bed and nearly the entire floor of our bedroom :)

WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!

2) Return anything that doesn't belong in your closet to its proper home. There is no reason to have old electronics boxes in your closet (not that I am speaking from experience or anything).

3) Now it's time to decide what to get rid of and what to keep. Your goal should be to reduce the number of items in your closet. Take a quick look at all of your items first. During this first pass, quickly decide what to get rid of or keep. You don't need anything fancy for this step–piles on the floor or bed will work just fine! Either toss or donate ALL items that you will not be keeping. It can be HARD to get rid of clothes, especially if you spent a significant amount of money on them. But the bottom line is that hanging on to excess stuff induces stress and is senseless! You should LOVE everything in your closet, even if that means you only have 30 pieces of clothing. So, follow these purging guidelines as you go through your items:

  1. Identify items with holes, missing buttons or other damage. Quickly decide quickly if those items are worth repairing. If it is, repair it or have it repaired within the week. Otherwise, get rid of it.
  2. If you haven't worn the item in the past year, get rid of it. Period.
  3. If it does not fit and has not fit in the past year, donate it or sell it. If you plan to lose weight to fit into items that are too small (haven't we all said that at least once), only hang on to them if you are within a month or so of that goal. If you still have 30 pounds to go, just accept the fact that you may have to invest in some new clothes when you reach your goal. Chances are the styles will have changed and you will want to reward yourself with a few new pieces of clothing.
  4. If you have multiple items that are VERY similar, such as 6 gray sweaters, choose your top one or two favorites and donate or sell the rest.

4) Once you have decided what to keep, return them to your closet in an organized fashion. Group like items together. If you are feeling like an organizing ninja, you can organize by color within those groups. If you have a tiny closet (like we've had in every single home before our current home), consider purchasing a portable closet to store out of season clothing OR store out of season clothing under your bed using under-the-bed rolling bins.

5) Consider adding some baskets, bins or even an extra rod to your closet to maximize your storage.

6) Finally, develop a system for keeping your closet clean and organized! Commit to folding and re-hanging your clothes every single day. And when you buy something new, take the time to evaluate whether there is something you can get rid of before placing the new item in your closet. The one-in-one-out rule is a great one to follow!

This is how our closet turned out after less than 2 hours. Best investment of time EVER! In the end we donated several large bags of clothes, which always feels nice. And it feels amazing to walk into a perfectly organized closet every morning :)

WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!
WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!

What are you waiting for? Go organize your closet! And if you have a closet organizing tip that I should add to the list, let me know!

Other posts you may enjoy:

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WOW! Come learn how to organize your closet in 2 hours or less with these simple and practical tips! You don't need a fancy closet system to do this!

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photo and blog post signature of Tasha Agruso for Kaleidoscope Living

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14 Comments

  1. My closet is about to get an overhaul.. I hang my pants and shirts together so I don’t end up with black pants and blue top. It also shows me what I’m missing for shopping.

  2. I have an additional tip to share. I change out my seasonal clothes every six months. When hanging the newly rotated clothes I reverse the hangers so they hook over the rod from the back. As I wear and return the clothes to the closet I hang the hanger the normal way, from the front of the rod. I can easily tell which clothes are being worn and which are not by the position of the hanger. At the end of the six months I take out the clothes that are still hanging in reverse and evaluate them. Most of the time they are put in the give-away pile. If I really think I might wear the item later and I’m not ready to get rid of it yet I put a tag on it. The next time that season rolls around and if I haven’t worn the item by the end of that season, out it goes.

    1. I love this Tina! Such a great way to really know if you are wearing everything and cleaning out what needs to go! Thanks for sharing :)

  3. How nice not to have to try on every piece of clothing before packing to make sure it fits!
    I would suggest the wire shelf dividers. On Amazon the ones that work with wooden shelves are 8 dividers for $18. Seems expensive but no matter how neatly I stack my sweaters, jeans and sweats as soon as I pull one out from the middle or bottom – there goes my neat pile!

  4. I liked your ideas on what to do with clothes you plan to get into when the weight is lost. Also, the rule of one new item in & one old item out. One other thing I do is organize my tops by color. All blacks together, blues together, etc. makes it so much easier to get dressed each day!

    1. I’ve had one wall closets in all of my other homes, but our current closet is quite small for a walk-in closet and is a very standard and normal closet for any house built in the 1980s and later.

  5. There is nothing like walking into an organized closet that only holds the clothes you really like and feel good in. I just did the same thing last month and not only did my house lose the weight of unwanted clothes, but there is a psychological weight lifted as well. Enjoy your close!