Peace of Mind Organizing

Alphabetizing my closet

3 October 2024

I know this is going to sound crazy, but I organize my hanging clothes alphabetically. And it makes me so happy.

Let me explain. I buy almost all my clothes from one company, wool&. They sell merino wool clothes that I adore. They’re comfortable, durable and come in a variety of styles. I’ve blogged about the 100-day dress challenge I did four years ago as well as my love of merino clothes in the past.

wool& names all its garments. (Right now I’m wearing Roam, Axis and Cypress, along with a non-wool& merino sweater.) Since each wool& item that’s hanging in my closet has a name I can alphabetize them. I have two pairs of pants that I store together at the beginning of the rack. But all the other wool& garments are in alphabetical order.

It’s hard for me to take a photo in my closet because it’s narrow and I can’t back up far. But I just snapped this picture. Certainly the organization is invisible to the naked eye!

I don’t have a whole lot of clothes, which is how I like it. (All my hanging clothes fit on one 2.5-foot rod rod.) I just counted and I have 33 wool& garments plus 16 garments from other companies. A few of them are merino shirts or sweaters from other companies and most of the rest are clothes I bought at my favorite St. Louis charity shop, The NCJW Resale Shop plus one non-wool special-occasion outfit. The non-wool& clothes live to the right of a divider. The one exception is a favorite skirt that I knitted more than ten years ago. It’s the first garment on the rod because I enjoy looking at it when I open the closet door. (I do have a dresser drawer with leggings and bike shorts and another drawer with undergarments…they’re all wool too!)

The reason this works so well for me is that it works with how I think about my clothes. When I get dressed, I mentally put together an outfit. Since each part of the outfit has a name, it’s easy for me to find each component. When I take an item off the hanger, I leave the hanger in place to make it easy for me to hang it back up again.

Prior to alphabetizing my closet (which I did six months ago), I organized my closet by type of clothing (dresses, pants, jackets/cardigans). And back when I had more clothes I would organize them by color within those category. That worked with how I think as well.

There’s no right way to organize your clothes. And I know most people couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) alphabetize their clothes. The best way to organize your closet, in my opinion, is to figure out how you think about your clothes and what would make it easy to find them and also to put them away. The way to keep a closet tidy is to put stuff away regularly. We all know that when we haphazardly put stuff in our closets it turns into an annoying mess quickly.

If you have a hard time finding the clothes you want to wear in your closet, I suggest going through them, letting go of the clothes that you don’t wear, and then thinking about how you go about selecting the clothes you do wear. Then perhaps you can revamp how you store them. It can be a fun exercise!

Tagged with: closet, wool&

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