03 Oct Organizing your closet: The scoop on hangers

Things got a little heavy around these parts last week, so let’s take things down a notch with another topic that’s near and dear to my heart. Hangers.

I grew up with a father who was a neat freak. His clothing was color-coded and each hanger hung exactly two fingers widths apart from its neighbor. That was a little crazy, and also a hard standard to replicate without a ruler and a compass.So mine looked a bit a lot like this:

As an organized person, the mayhem drove me bananas. But my closet also made me crazy with its inefficient storage, hard-to-access shelving and rods hung way too high. So I left the insanity as it was and dreaded walking into my closet.

A few years and one reno project later, I had the closet of my dreams. I also ordered several dozen wooden hangers and was thrilled with all that uniform goodness.

Sadly, the wooden hanger honeymoon period was short-lived when I quickly realized how bulky they were. They took up so much space, I felt like I had less hanging room than I’d had in my old closet.

Then one day, walking through Homesense, I spotted these:

Slim-line, velvety hangers that could save space AND prevent my clothes from slipping. I bought a dozen, brought them home and tried them. It was love. Now I have several garbage bags of wooden hangers sitting in my storage room and my closet looks like this:

I swear, I did not clean up my closet for this picture.

Not color-coded, but pretty neat.

If you want to start creating a bit of peace and harmony in your closet, which makes choosing your outfits a whole lot more pleasant, the first step is ditching all of those mismatched, plastic, dry-cleaner orphans and investing in a set of matching hangers. I suggest you go with the velvet option, but choose what appeals to you.

You can find velvety, non-slip hangers here, and here.

And while you’re rehanging, consider grouping your clothing by hue. A little color coding never hurt anyone.