As time passes, certain activities are demanded of us. The yard has to get mowed. The tax receipts have to get organized by tax day. But then other things have no deadline. There’s no outside pressure to clean out the closet. No one from the government is going to call you about painting the house or getting kitchen dividers so you can find your utensils with ease.

These are the type of tips I want to address in this hub, while sharing some useful advice on how to make it easier to accomplish the task.

Organizing Kitchen Drawers and The Pantry

It takes hardly any time to organize the kitchen pantry and any often accessed kitchen drawers. For the drawers, I suggest getting some dividers to sort out the space in each drawer, creating little pockets of space to help better organize your kitchen items.For the pantry, it’s easy enough to sort things out first by throwing out any super old or expired foods. I suggest you then take all the least often accessed items and place them at either the very bottom of the very top. If you have any heavy food items, such as 20 pound bags of rice, save the bottom area for them to make it easier (and safer for kids) to help out in the kitchen. If you feel so inclined, go to Target or any home store and grab a couple air tight tupperware containers and move in your cereals, grains, flours, and so into them. Label them with a date. If it’s not obvious what it is (such is the case at times with different types of flour, sugar, spices, etc) then be sure to label it with a name too!

Organizing the Garage

Oh boy, this is a biggie right. Or at least, for many people it is. How crazy is your garage right now? Probably not the most organized room in the house, I would dare to venture without even seeing it! The good news is that you can get things into shape in a single afternoon with some extra hands, sweat, and of course, with the help of some organizer or storage tools. Because garage storage systems are big business, it’s easy to find all sorts of useful storage items for the garage. But first, clean it out. Yep, I’m sorry, but it has to be done! Clean out the garage of all trash and items taking up space. Get rid of as much as possible. Then, with the addition of storage bins, sports racks, and if needed, a good set of garage shelves, re-organize your items. Sports gear and children’s toys make an excellent pair for over sized storage bins. If you’ve got bikes, spend a few dollars and get a bike rack to keep it in place.

Also, while you’re at it, sweep the garage floor!

Getting The Attic under Control

I don’t even want to touch this one. But…

Do you have an attic? Awesome. Can you use it for anything other than massly disorganized storage? Well, you can, so I will give it a shot in one sentence on how to do so. I will actually reduce it to words.

LABEL EVERYTHING.

Moving on…

Organizing the Closet

Cheap closet organizers are a man best friend. Or a couples best friend, or a woman’s best friend! The point is that closet organizers make life easier. They’re also not very expensive at all, unless you shoot for a custom install or something. Throw up a few closet organizer shelves, get a shoe rack, get hangers that can hold weight and won’t break – all these things will make a huge difference.

If you still don’t have enough room, consider buying what’s known as a portable closet for extra storage and keeping it in the guest room. If you’d like to get something sweeter, check out a nice wooden wardrobe closet. They’re pricey, but they last forever and of course will give you a second closet to work with.

Also, as mentioned in nearly all these tips, if you go through all your clothes and assorted related items that are in your closet, and get rid of things you don’t wear, need, or use, it will make organizing the rest of your things much, much easier!

First thing first – let’s address the question of wasted space. And what could be the biggest space waster in that closet of yours? It’s the answer not everyone like to hear, but we all know it applies to us, too – I’m talking about all those clothes stuck in the back of the closet that never get worn! Old clothes are the biggest space waster in the closet. The best thing you can to before you buy any extra closet shelving or racks is to go through ALL your clothes and get rid of what you don’t wear any longer. The more adventurous among us can use the following principle: if you’ve worn it in the last year, it stays. If you’ve not worn it in the last year, it goes! And while we’re at it, let’s also address non-closet items being in the closet taking up space. It’s time to take out all the random stuff you’ve shoved back there, such as those cheap barstools you meant to sell on Craiglist, broken corner China cabinets that really is a double space waster since it actually saves space when set up properly, or god forbid, other unmentionables we won’t even get to that really belong in the garage or attic (or the trash!).

With that out of the way – wow, there’s a bit more space in there now, isn’t there? So the question now is what’s let and how to organize it? Assessing your inventory now is meaningful question. The easiest and least expensive way to proceed organizing your closet space would now be to purchase some cheap shelving – for instance, a cloth-based rack that attaches to the closet rod, hanging down, and adds 6-10 little shelf spaces for shoes, sweaters, sock, underwear, and so on. Something like this can usually be purchased for very little cash – in the range of $10-25 dollars. The return on this small investment is that you will actually be able to organize your closet now with all that extra space!

Secondly, another method of making good use of the space is to purchase what’s called a doubling rod. This ingenious little device adds another closet rod to hang clothes on – in fact, it attaches to the first rod, but hangs below your clothes. So essentially you can double the amount of clothes that you’re able to hang in the closet! And once again, the  nice part of this tool is that it won’t cost hundreds of dollars (like  a full scale closet organizer that you put together and install will cost you typically), but rather it costs roughly $15-25.

These three tips taken together will work work wonders for closet organization!

If you have more than one child and are saving clothes from child A to be used by child B, then having a system for organizing these clothes is all the more pertinent. And if there’s more than two kids, then you’ll have to organize things or it will look like a clothing war is going on in the bedroom.

This is where the purchase of a few closet organizer products or even a  kids closet organizer where truly make all the difference!

Buying a few hanging shelves for the closet, along with a few “closet cubes” (nice looking boxes, essentially), and a label (or a good memory) for each section, season, or age for clothing – this is the key!

For example, we suggest the following method to organize your childrens clothing. Take all the clothes of a certain size for a certain age and group them together in one or more congruent shelves. Label the shelves if desired. If there are many clothes and this is still too messy, then further subdivide them into seasons like spring clothes and winter clothes. The important part is to keep each bundle separate from the others and easily identifiable,  otherwise, you’ll just end up back in the same situation probably. Once all the clothes for all ages and seasons are organized this way, you’ll find that re-using the clothes for the next child is a breeze. In fact, as far as closet organization goes, all the work has been done, and you simply find what you need using the same method you’ve been using.

There are also a few ways to keep it lively and perhaps more interesting for your child if he or she likes to pick out their clothing. Closet shelving and closet cubes now are made for all sorts of kids stuff – such as a shelf with pictures of trucks on the side or a Disney princess. These touches can make it more fun for your child to take part in keeping the closet organized!

One last bit of information – don’t forget the shoes! We here at the Closet Organizers Guide know more than few parents who feed a healthy shoe habit for their little girls. Yes, yes, kids shoes are tiny (and cute) but if you have 2 dozen pairs, they have to go somewhere, and if there’s not a shoe rack, then that somewhere will be everywhere. So invest in a small rack or shelf that is just a few inches off the ground (so it’s easily accesible to the child) and get in the habit of taking and returning all the childrens shoes from here!