A nice looking organized closet can make you feel good, feel great!  What a great way to start off the day- picking out your clothes from something that feels a little like a boutique!

It really doesn’t take much effort to get your closet in boutique shape- and keep it that way, even if your closet isn’t a walk-in closet or the size of a bedroom.  Our closet is a standard 6′ long closet with sliding doors.  We took the sliding doors off and hung sheer curtains which mostly stay pushed to the sides, but we can shut them if we want to obscure our closet contents for any reason.  We put a nice hefty closet organizer in place years ago, and I painted the walls of the closet a soft blue (to match our bedroom color at the time).  I think it adds a little decorative element.

The following two pictures are not of my closet, but you get the idea of how the panels look:

I wrote a story in 2009 about how you can organize your closet to ensure you are actually wearing all the clothes you have in it…you can read it here.  But for today’s story I want to share my favorite closet organizing items.

1) Storage boxes.  I keep two big black storage boxes in my closet.  Purchased from The Container Store eons ago, I LOVE these boxes. 

I think the black boxes help keep my closet looking ‘sleek’.  I keep two in the bottom of my closet.  One holds all the hardly-ever-worn-but-still-need items like painting clothes, work in the yard clothes, Wrangler jeans, etc.  The other box is my seasonal box.  In the summer it’s full of sweaters and courderoy and knitwear.  In the Fall, I pull them out and fill the box with my shorts and tank-tops.  Perfect! 

2) Wooden hangers.  OK, I’ll admit I have too many shirts to be able to afford wooden hangers for all of them, not only from the space they take up, but also the expense of replacing all those hangers.  So I just have the wooden hangers on one side of my closet.   The side that I hang my lightweight jackets and sweaters on.  It really does make a difference in how that side of the closet “looks”.

3) Pant hangers.  These are the best!  I hang my jeans on them (I don’t own any slacks or non-denim except for my cargo capris).  I love these open-ended pant hangers because jeans just slide right on and off, no need to pick up the hanger or use two hands. 

4) Plastic hangers.  Ideally I’d like to have all the hangers in my closet match.  Wood hangers would be so pretty, but not really a viable option for me,  so I stick with the plastic hangers.  But I do wish they were all one color.  Instead, I have a mishmash of hanger colors and styles.  As OCD as I can be about some things, this is one that doesn’t bother me “too” much.  (As I sit here cringing and twitching.)

Seriously, that picture makes me almost ill.  I can handle the different colors, but not the different sizes and shapes and thicknesses.  Those bulky yellow ones would have to go, and those weird shaped white ones and the red one up front.  Please- someone fix this!

Once you have all the right organizing tools….then you can organize your clothes to make your closet prettier or more boutique-like.

I always put the least often worn things on the farthest ends, out of season clothing out of sight, and favorites within first grasp.  For example, this time of year I’m not wearing short-sleeves, although I still want the option to on occasion (for layering) so I’m not going to box them up, but I probably won’t leave my full selection out.  I have all my long-sleeves hanging closest to my reach with the short-sleeves behind them, and the hardly-worn items behind those.

And pretty.  The items that can make your closet look pretty should be the first items you see when you go to your closet.  I found these “pretty” closet pictures online.  A girl can dream, right?