How To Organize Men’s Closet
A messy closet is frustrating to navigate. The clothes that come from it are often rumpled, so you’d have to spend extra time ironing or steaming them. This also makes it harder to look your best.
Conversely, an organized closet lets you spend less time trying to find what you want to wear while also making your closet look clean and neat at the same time.
Learn the best strategies for how to organize men’s closets with ideal solutions such as using specialized storage, organizers and folding methods.
What is the Best Way to Organize Your Closet?
Perfectly color-coded closets or shirts hung by sleeve length look neat and organized, but make sure to maintain this practice. Everything can go back to a chaotic mess if you’re not motivated to maintain them.
Meanwhile, the size of your closet also determines the storage solutions that are fit for you. Still, there are a few closet organization hacks that work for every closet. Read more about our closet size design guide here.
Keep similar items together. Stick to only one method of organizing your clothes: whether folded on a shelf or hung from a rod. Don’t store some of your shirts on a shelf while deciding to hang the rest, for instance.
Make it easy on yourself. Some people hate hanging, while others would rather do anything than fold laundry. Take your preferences into account and stick with the method that works best for you.
Leave empty space. Think about your experience while shopping in a retail store vs sorting through things at a thrift shop. The former has plenty of room on the rail to slide hangers back and forth, giving you a good look at all your options.
Meanwhile, thrift stores and charity shops are usually bursting at the seams, requiring more effort to locate and extract a single item of clothing.
Get rid of clothes you don’t wear. When you organize your closet, hang the hooks of the hangers so that the open portion faces toward you.
Set a reminder for 18 months. After you’ve worn and washed an item, put it back on the rod in the regular way. When the reminder pops up, anything still facing the wrong way should be donated or discarded.
Men’s Closet Organizer
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If you’re having trouble deciding on how best to organize your closet, consider consulting a professional closet organizer. These professionals will evaluate the clothes and storage options you already have at your disposal.
You can ask them questions to learn what works best for you. In turn, they’ll make recommendations about how to change your closet around to suit your needs best.
Hang an Extra Rod
Many closets have a single rod, hung 60 inches off the floor. To give you more storage space, it’s best to hang two rods, one at 80 inches, and the other at 40 inches.
This effectively doubles the space that you have to store your clothes, making it easier to find the items you’re looking for while also preventing your closet from being overcrowded.
Hang Pants from Light to Dark
Color-coding your closet is one of the easiest ways to organize it so that you can quickly and easily find the clothes you need. This method is particularly effective for pants, where light pants tend to be less formal than dark pants.
Shoe Organizer with Angled Shelves
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Purchasing a shoe organizer with angled shelves mainly serves two purposes. First, it keeps the bottom of your closet from becoming too cluttered. Read more about our article on closet shoe storage ideas here.
Second, shelves with a 20-degree angle make it easier to see all the shoes you own, which makes it possible that you will get to wear them all. No shoes will ever be neglected again just because they are stored in an inaccessible spot in your closet.
Make sure to purchase a model with space for two or three more pairs than you currently own, so that you will have extra space for more shoes as your collection expands.
Specialized Storage
Men’s closets tend to contain certain articles of clothing that can be comparable to women’s closets. Belts, ties, and pocket squares fall into this category. Besides those, there are also various jewelry pieces to store such as cufflinks, tie pins, or watches.
A closet drawer with dividers or organizers makes it easy to keep these smaller items organized. Roll belts and ties, and store each one in its own place, organized by color.
Do the same thing with the watches to prevent scratching the faces and bands. For cufflinks and tie pins, the storage solution depends on the size of your collection. If these are infrequently worn items, it’s fine to pile them all into one of the drawer sections.
Add a Hamper
To keep the floor of your bedroom clean and organized, it’s best to have a place where you can put in dirty or soiled clothes until it’s time to launder them. Keeping a hamper in your closet provides a place for dirty clothes, streamlining your laundry process.
Most hampers are between 12 and 24 inches tall, making them perfect to go under clothes hanging from a single rod. If you have two rods, you will need to sacrifice some hanging space to make the hamper easily accessible.
Properly Fold Clothing
Improperly folded clothing creates unsightly wrinkles and creases in your clothes, looking disorganized while taking up more space than necessary. Learn how to properly fold the items in your closet to stay organized.
Jeans can be folded along the zipper line, then folded horizontally or hung from a hanger. To keep your dress pants looking nice, fold in half vertically along the crease on the front of the pants. Then, clip them to a pants hanger to avoid horizontal creasing.
Shirts with collars should always be hung, as the collar will become misshapen if stored in a stack of shirts. Sweaters, sweatshirts, and t-shirts are all fold-friendly.
Use the two-pinch method to quickly fold shirts as neatly as a department store employee. It takes some practice to get it right, but it will save you more time in the long run.
How to Fold Clothing Using the Two-Pinch Method
Use a folding board to get perfectly folded shirts every time. Each folded item will be exactly the same size, making it easier to stack them without falling over. The folded board can be stowed at the side of your closet or behind your hamper for easy access.
If you’re short on space, consider the ranger roll folding method. Take note that you won’t be able to see the design on the front of the t-shirt, so this probably won’t work if you have multiple t-shirts in exactly the same color.
How to Use the Ranger Roll Folding Method
Is it Better to Hang or Fold Jeans?
Unlike other, dressier pants, jeans can hold up perfectly well inside a drawer and do not require ironing before use. This is because the heavy denim used to make jeans doesn’t crease easily.
They are thicker than other kinds of pants and hold their shape well when folded.
If you have extra space in your closet to hang all your pants together, fold the jeans together lengthwise and hang them over the hanger. But, if you’re saving more space in your closet, take the jeans out and store them in a drawer instead.
Should I Hang My T-Shirts or Fold Them?
T-shirts, like jeans, can be either hung or folded. Most t-shirts are also made of fabrics that have a low wrinkle to wrinkle-free properties, even if you fold them.
However, if you want to be free from the ironing task at all costs, you will need to properly fold them and keep your drawer from being overstuffed. One way to do this is to stack your folded shirts on a closet shelf.
Hanging avoids wrinkling, but thin hangers may cause t-shirts to stretch out of shape. Choose thicker, padded hangers for t-shirts especially if you have extra space in your closet.
For more related content about how to organize men’s closet, check out this closet vs wardrobe page.
