Painless Closet Organizing

There it is lurking behind a closed door and taunting you: Your Messy Closet. You'd like to get something out of that closet, but if you aren't seriously injured by things crashing on you when you open the door, you probably won't be able to find whatever it is your looking for anyway. Better to just keep the door closed.

I'm sorry to say that you are now 0 and 1 with your closet. It's time to improve your score. But before you panic, let me offer you a few words of comfort: Organizing a closet doesn't have to be daunting. It really doesn't, honest. You just need a plan that you can take in easy, doable steps.

Step 1: Pick your closet. That's right: Your secret is out. I know that if you have one messy closet, you probably have many. But the last thing you need is to be overwhelmed before you even get started, so pick one of the monsters and forget the others for now.

Step 2: Set your timer. You are going to organize this closet in easy to manage periods so you don't burnout. The length of time you work depends on you, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, or maybe 30 minutes. Make it enough time so you can accomplish something (and you can accomplish a lot in 15 minutes), but not so much that you burnout.

Step 3: Get yourself four boxes and label them "Toss," "Donate," "Put Away," and "Keep."

Step 4: There are many schools of thought on organizing that say you should now select a small section of the closet and focus on it. For my part, I like to start off a project like this with a real sense of accomplishment, so I prefer to make a "sweep" through the closet and gather up as many "Toss" items as I can and put them in the box.

Some items will be obvious "Tosses," but here are a few tips for deciding about the iffy ones. Ask yourself if:

1. You've used the item in the past year.

2. The item is valuable to you (and value can be sentimental as well as monetary).

3. The item might come in handy someday.

If you haven't used it in a year, it's out. Either toss it or donate it depending on its usefulness and condition.

If the item is valuable, maybe you can sell it. If the item is sentimental, you can hold on to it or maybe instead of keeping the item itself, you can take a picture of it for a memory book/box. Whatever you decide, be strict with yourself: Everything that reminds you of something is not worth keeping (Do you really need all of your children's old toys? Do you really need your great aunt's favorite sweater? Do you really need every vacation brochure you picked up on your trip to Aruba?)

Number 3 is sort of a trick question because it's the standard reason people give for keeping stuff they don't need. In case you haven't guessed, everything in number 3 goes to the Toss or Donate boxes.

Take the Toss and Donate boxes and get that stuff out of the house. If you don't have time to actually take it where it needs to go (e.g., the dump, a charity) right now, at least put it in your car so it's ready to go.

For Step 5, get yourself those four boxes and now pick a section of your closet to work on. If you pick an area that is easily accessible, you'll automatically be clearing your way to the back of the closet as you work rather than having to climb over things to work on an area. Whatever you do, don't take everything out of the closet as you'll find yourself with an overwhelming mess that is now out of your closet.

Evaluate each item in the section you're working on and put it in the appropriate box or, if it was actually where it belonged, put it back. When the timer goes off, get the Toss and Donate boxes out of the house (or if there's very little in them, keep them in the closet for your next session), put the Put Away items where they belong , and put the Keep box back in the closet for next time.

You now only need to repeat step 4 until all you've got left in the closet is what belongs there. You should feel better and ready to organize what you kept. That can also be accomplished in manageable steps, but . . . those steps are for another day.