As I mentioned in Sunday's post, even well-designed closets can fall into disorder after a time. Like all closets, things seem to find their way to the floor. The other day I decided to do something about it: I took out everything that wasn't hanging in the double-hung closet I use for my shirts, jackets, and skirts; some organizers recommend that you take everything out of a closet you're organizing--including everything that's hanging--but that's just too much chaos for my taste. Just taking out all the stuff hidden in the back or stuffed into the corner was chaos enough (see above right).
And yet: it only took an hour to organize everything and find homes for the various odd items. Before, when I had my old single-rod closet, everything was squished so tight that it would take hours to organize and even then, everything was perpetually wrinkled from being so overstuffed. These days, I try to maintain a strict, item-in-item out policy, as even plentiful closet space can become unpleasantly packed without regular culling. 
As for my general organizing strategy, I pretty much keep it simple: I like to organize my clothes light-to-dark by color family. I know a lot of people like to separate their clothes according to function, i.e. work clothes, evening clothes, weekend clothes, etc., but since I work in an business casual environment and because my evenings are spent pretty much the same way as my weekends, I don't see the point in separating my clothes in this way. I'm also not much of a fan of separating out and packing away off-season clothes; I don't have the room to separately store off-season stuff, and it doesn't particularly bother me to see a sweater in July or a sleeveless shirt in January.
*Note: this post has been edited to correct the original, which erroneously attributed the take-everything-out-of-the-closet approach as being advocated by professional organizer and best-selling author Regina Leeds.
Organizing Double-Hung Shirt/Jacket/Skirt Closet
