From Piles to Files: File your clothes to save time and space

You open your dresser drawer and squint into the top layer of an epic tangle of pants.  You dig for a bit, finally grabbing a pair from the top layer (those are your most worn pairs anyway), and pull them on.  The entire process takes about 30 seconds.  Not so bad, right? What if you knew that it could take 5 seconds, fit more pairs of pants in the drawer, and be way less frustrating visually?  Especially in dressers with deep drawers, filing your clothes is a much more effective and efficient use of space that makes every piece immediately visible.  Let the revolution begin!

Start with your pants.  Take everything out of the drawer and sort them according to use, color, or whatever categories make sense to you.  Then ask yourself “Do I love these?  Do I feel confident when I wear them?”  If the answer’s no, away they go!  Fold the remaining pairs according to the depth of the drawer (the length of the side seam after folding should be just slightly shorter than the depth of the drawer).  My dresser drawers are incredibly deep, so I just fold mine in fourths.  For more shallow drawers, you may have to fold smaller or even roll your pants.  Insert the pants into the front of the drawer with the waist opening facing down.  Keep adding until the drawer is full.

This method also works great with bulky items like sweaters.  Follow the same method you used for the pants.  You may want to group your sweaters by color, weight, or style.  Mine are grouped by weight, then color, with cardigans on the far left side of the drawer.

While the filing method works best for bulkier items or clothes that have some stiffness, like jeans, you can absolutely file knits like t-shirts and pajamas.  The difference is that thin t-shirts won’t hold each other in place as well as some of the thicker clothing does, so you have to have a pretty full row for them to stand up nicely.  One way to work around this is to fold the shirts according to the depth of the drawer, make a pile, then flip the pile on its end and insert the whole stack into the drawer.  It eliminates having to hold the shirts up while you add new ones to the file.

Now you can see what you have and find what you want in seconds!