Your wardrobe can be a disorganized place. Most people have an unseparated mixture of everyday clothes side-by-side with old, unworn items. In fact, a survey from Weight Watchers suggests that people in the UK have £10bn worth of unworn clothes in their wardrobe – a figure that equates to £200 per person. This sort of wastage isn’t efficient and can add an unnecessary hassle to your day.
Guide to improving your wardrobe
Below, we explore how to improve your wardrobe and the potential benefits.
Decluttering
Decluttering can help make your wardrobe an easier space to manage. There are plenty of other benefits this will bring you too. For a start, a tidy space can help reduce anxiety. Most people enjoy having control over their life, rather than living in chaos. A carefully organised wardrobe can remove one of those little stresses from your life and create a calmer home environment.
At the same time, decluttering your wardrobe can build confidence too. Organising your space effectively requires a certain amount of problem-solving: how can I fit all these objects into this limited space? By solving this puzzle, you can feel more productive and assured in your decision-making.
And there are surprising advantages too. When you declutter your wardrobe, you might find hidden treasures that you’d long forgotten about. It’s easy to absent-mindedly toss an item into the wardrobe and then move on. When it comes to decluttering though, you’ll be able to recover these items. Make sure you check every item that you remove from the wardrobe, and you might potentially find something of value.
Making the most of your space
Following decluttering, the next step at this point is to analyze your space and work out how to fill it. This is all about carefully maximizing all the space available to you. The floorspace is one such area you can exploit. Once you’ve decluttered, you can see if your floor can store any items. Perhaps your shoes could fit here, or maybe a box full of more clothes. Either way, floorspace is usually an underused area in the wardrobe.
Corners are another area that can be maximized. Usually, they can be awkward places to fit items around. However, by using a corner shelf you can make the most of every nook and cranny inside the wardrobe. And it’s a similar story with the doors to your wardrobe too. Rather than leaving the inside of the door bare, you could add hooks to it to hang jewelry or bags on.
You could, alternatively, completely revamp this space. You could create a much larger wardrobe to house many more possessions and clothes. A walk-in-wardrobe can be the ideal way to declutter your bedroom and effectively organize your storage space. Walk-in-wardrobes can be designed with or without doors and come with all sorts of storage solutions depending on your situation. The added space that a walk-in-wardrobe brings could be achieved by upgrading your current wardrobe, or by redesigning one end of your bedroom.
Categorise
Once you’ve decluttered the wardrobe and taken a look at using your space efficiently, you can then begin to organize your clothes and items inside the wardrobe. Categorizing them is one potential option with plenty of benefits.
A simple system of categorizing your clothes would be to split them into their different seasons. Warm clothes – hats, gloves, fleeces – can go in a winter pile for instance, while bikinis and skirts can join a more summery pile. Not only will this make it much easier to pick out the clothes you want to wear, but it’ll save time and space.
Arranging this can seem difficult initially, especially as some clothes can work across multiple categories. A good place to begin is with the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule suggests that we wear 20 percent of our clothes 80 percent of the time. Ask yourself which clothes go underused and why. With this in mind, you can sort out which items you no longer need to save space and time.
On top of this, you can also arrange your clothes into piles that are durable and those which are more delicate. For the delicate garments, you can separate them into a designated cotton garment bag to ensure that they don’t get damaged. If you carelessly use a plastic bag to store them it could damage your more fragile clothes as they need strong air circulation to avoid deteriorating. If you’re especially concerned about your clothes staying fresh, you can try adding dried lavender to the fabric. This can add a fragrant natural scent and discourage bugs from settling.
Final words
Improving your wardrobe requires three distinct steps. You need to start off by decluttering to ensure that it’s neat and tidy, before working out how to make the most of this space. Finally, you’ll want to then organize your clothes into logical groups to separate them. If you want to make a real effort you could even try and upgrade to a walk-in wardrobe! Overall, by following this process you should be able to improve your wardrobe.
