How to Organize Your Wardrobe

Tired of wasting time looking for the right tie or shirt to go with a certain pair of pants, or weeding through your clothes that are strewn all over the floor or piled high on a chair? Frustrated with being late for everything because you can’t ever find matching shoes?

Relax, take a deep breath and read on for some helpful tips for taming the closet monster and for getting yourself organized in the process.

Start at the Top

If the top of your dressers aren’t visible, get a box or a bag and clear everything off first. Then you’ll need a valet, no not someone to park the car, but a small box, usually wooden, that’s used for storing things like cuff links, your watches, wallet, keys, wedding ring, and some even double as a charging station for your cell phone and similar electronic devices.

Women call them “jewelry boxes” and we call them “valets” as ours are able to be far more useful than just simply holding some jewelry or the kid’s baby teeth.

Dig Into the Middle

Next it’s time to empty out all of your dresser drawers and unload the closet. It makes sense to organize the closet by the type of clothing you have. Work clothes should be in one section along with ties, casual clothing in another and maybe another for jeans, suits, or pieces you don’t wear very often.

If there’s room in the top of the closet to stack items like sweaters, hats, or whatever might not fit inside the dresser drawers, set aside a pile for these things and consider installing a shelf or two in the closet if you don’t already have one. Also, it’s better to keep any type of hat stored on a flat surface rather than on hooks as they’ll pull them out of shape.

The smallest dresser drawers should be reserved for socks and underwear, with the socks grouped together in pairs however you like. If you wear a lot of t-shirts and undershirts you’ll probably need a whole drawer just for them, sorted by type and folded in some sort of neat fashion so they don’t get wrinkled beyond recognition
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Finish at the Bottom

Jeans, shorts, and sweatpants should all be kept in the bottom drawers, although jeans do take up quite a bit of valuable drawer space and can be hung up in the closet if need be.

Most men don’t have a large collection of shoes, but nevertheless, a few pairs for work, some casual shoes, and another pair or two of athletic shoes do add up. If you have the room in the closet, use a shoe rack, either the kind that hangs on the back of the door or one that sits inside on the floor or on a shelf. If closet space is already at a premium, clear the dust bunnies out from under the bed and keep them there along with flat boxes for storing rarely used items.

Now that you’re all done, the trick is keeping it this way, which can easily be achieved with minimal effort on your part by doing a once-a-week quick clean up.

Quickly Organize the Garage With These Simple Tips

If you’re anything at all like most people, us men in particular, truth be told, your garage doubles as a dumping ground that’s filled with clutter, odds and ends, storage boxes, and pretty much everything but the family car.

Luckily, there’s a relatively painless solution to this madness that will allow you to reclaim your garage and have a completely useable space in no time. The key lies with organizing by type, similar to the way home improvement and hardware stores arrange their wares. You wouldn’t shop in a store where you had to traipse from one section to the next to buy bolts and washers would you? Or, spackle and joint compound? Or, rakes and lawnmowers?

It simply doesn’t make much sense to have a garage that’s in complete and utter disarray as the time and energy that’s wasted looking for things could certainly be better spent elsewhere. So, gather up all of your common sense, a few empty boxes and some garbage bags and be prepared to devote an entire weekend, or at least one Saturday, to finally getting the garage organized.

You’ll want to start out by assigning specific sections to areas of the garage depending on what you have. For example, designate one wall for paint supplies or hardware, another corner for garden tools, one wall with shelves for sporting goods, another section for automotive supplies or holiday decorations.

When you’re sorting through everything, use the empty boxes for things that need repaired or those that can be donated, pitched, or returned to your neighbor. Have another pile for those items that don’t really need to be kept here. Could the luggage be kept in the attic? What about the boxes of holiday decorations? Could those be stored neatly in the basement instead?

Do an honest assessment of what you have and be use a bit of creativity to find other homes for those items that are taking up valuable space.

Also, don’t try to work around everything, take it all out, or at least piled in one corner of the garage, before attempting to put it all back in a neat, orderly manner. You will also probably accumulate another pile of stuff that doesn’t seem to fit in any of the aforementioned categories and will, therefore, need their own special area to call home.

When rearranging and replacing everything, first consider how often you use each item and plan the layout from there. Take advantage of wall space and install shelves if you don’t already have them, or wall cabinets, peg boards, hooks, and hanging racks that will help to keep things up and off the floor but easily accessible.

Now that you have the garage nice and orderly, make it a point to keep it that way by committing to a maintenance schedule of sorts, cleaning and organizing just two or three times a year, and this way, you’ll never have to start from scratch again.

The Ultimate Desk Organizer

One of my New Year’s resolutions that I decided to get an early jump on this year was to become more organized, completely, finally, and for once and for all. We’ve all heard of the many attractive benefits that come along with being organized, including everything from simply having a cleaner house or work environment, to saving an incredible amount of time and money, to having less stress and tension, and who of us couldn’t use less of that?

I knew I had to begin my newly organized life starting first with my desk at work and then the one in my office at home, both of which were becoming harder and harder to find. And, unfortunately, I’m really not the kind of guy who buys anything on impulse, whether it’s a car or a box of paper, and must instead do some thorough research before spending my hard earned money, which is why I started my quest long before the first of January snuck up on me.

After doing plenty of the aforementioned research for the absolute perfect tool to help me organize both of my workspaces, I finally hit the jackpot when I found the Desk Apprentice Rotating Desk Organizer at Staples for 39.99, which was quite possibly the best forty bucks I’ve spent in a long time. This thing literally has a place for everything you can think of, whether it’s files and folders, pens, pencils, or staplers and scissors, you will be able to store whatever you need in this organizer that rotates a complete 360 degrees.

While the organizer is big enough to hold file folders, notebooks, and even a ream or two of paper, there are several smaller areas for keeping those tiny items neat and orderly, like the paper clips, push pins, staples, rubber bands, and erasers that always seem to find their way to the bottom of my desk drawer tangled in a messy heap.

The dimensions of the Desk Apprentice Rotating Desk Organizer, which comes only in a sleek black color, by the way, are 11 inches high by 16 inches wide and 16 inches deep. And, while you will need ample room on top of your desk or table to keep the organizer handy and close by, the space and time it can save you is immeasurable.