Professional Organizer Washington DC, Virginia, Maryland Scott Roewer’s organizing blog DeClutterYou

This is the fifth video in a nine-part series of “How to Organize Your Closet Like a Pro” and we’ll take a look at organizing your linens.

I love living in the city. However, with city life, you often find a lack of storage space. In this home, there was a lack of closet storage. So the homeowner decided to store sheets, towels, blankets, tablecloths, and material in his master bedroom closet. As you can imagine, the closet was over flowing!

In this 4 minute video, I demonstrate the basic steps you can follow to sort your household linens. Because this homeowner was short on space, we had to find a new home for the towels. In order to redistribute them to another area of the home, I suggested we add a shelf in the linen closet/laundry room conveniently located outside the main bathroom. By adding a shelf here, we were able to move the bath towels closer to the bathroom. Several old blankets were donated, and we used large sweater bags from The Container Store to keep items clean and organized in the closet. Finally, we made use of the space under his bed and stored some of the linens that were not frequently used in the Underbed Containers from The Container Store.

Do you have a creative way you store linens? How many blankets and sheets do you think you should have for each bed in your home? Please share your comments below.

If you’ve missed the first four videos in this how-to video series, please review these posts. If you have any questions about the process, or if you get stuck, please let us know by leaving a comment below.

Organizing Your Closet – A How-To Series

Organizing Your Closet – Measuring and Planning Your New Closet

Closet Organizing – Removing the Old Closet

Closet Organizing – How to Sort & Downsize Your Closet Clutter

This is the fourth video in a nine-part series of “How to Organize Your Closet Like a Pro”.  In this 5 minute video, I’ll show you how a professional organizer sorts through clutter found in a closet.  Treasurers buried in this closet include an old “Born To Kvetch” desk calendar, tons of stationary, $150 of new gift cards, unopened mail, magazines, unused electronics, trash, you name it! We’ll sort these items into suggested three categories; Keep, Donate, and Trash. The homeowner will need to review the piles we’ve sorted and make the final decisions on what items he’ll keep. The bottom line, most of what we found in the various bins did not belong in his bedroom closet.

Additionally, in this video, I highlight a photo scanning service called, Scan My Photos. They’ll scan approximately 2000, 4″ x 6″ photos at 300 DPI and return them to you with a DVD of the images for $124.95. Check here for the full details on this service. Scan My Photos isn’t the only memory preservation company available online. In a future blog post, I’ll do a side-by-side comparison of this company with similar vendors.

I hope you’re enjoying this how-to video series.  If you missed the prior three videos in the “How to Organize Your Closet Like A Pro” series, you can view the following posts.

Organizing Your Closet – A How-To Series

Organizing Your Closet – Measuring and Planning Your New Closet

Closet Organizing – Removing the Old Closet

Organizing your closet is possible for you to do at home. However, knowing how to measure and plan your space is the difficult part. In this how-to series, I’ll show you how to measure your space, measure your clothes and how to come up with a custom closet design for yourself. This is part 2 of a 9 part series on how to organize you closet like a professional.

I’ll be sharing one video post per day until all 9 videos are shared here on declutteryou.com. Please leave your questions and comments below. I look forward to our conversations.

If you missed the first video, please view this post.

Organizing your closet is possible! Here are a few simple how-to’s for decluttering and organizing your closet.

1. Empty out the closet completely. Yes, completely!
2. While it’s empty, vacuum and dust the interior.
3. Sort the clothing and accessories by categories: jackets, pants, skirts, shirts, shoes, belts, and so forth.
4. Pick a category and start returning items from that group to the closet. When placing them in the closet, group them by color and by season. Don’t put clothes back that have stains or tears, are unworn, or are out of style.
5. Hang the items ‘backwards’ (note the hanger in this picture). Once you wear the item, return it to the closet ‘forwards.’ At the end of the season all of the backward hangers are clothes you did not wear.

Bonus tip: Keep a paper bag in the bottom of your closet. During the season drop items into the bag you will no longer use. Once the bag is full take it to Goodwill or your favorite clothing charity.