Were you maybe thinking when I posted the “before” of my closet organization in our bedroom styling post that I was a tad bold to offer my organizing services and show that picture on the same website? Here's a refresher if you need it:

Yeah, me too. But don’t judge too harshly: that was when we’d just moved in! It takes some time to figure out exactly how you need to use your space, and I usually wait a bit before going whole-hog on organizing efforts to figure out our needs.

That said, here’s a more organized closet:

Feast your eyes.

It’s not perfect, and I’m not sure Martha would approve, but it’s really working for us. There are a lot of good closet organizing ideas out there, in everything from infographic to video form, but here’re my tips.

1.       Make your space work for you. This closet system, which I believe is Ikea, belongs to the people we’re staying with. We changed the height of the shelves and brought in additional storage in the form of a repurposed printer table to better house our stuff.

2.       Everyone and their mom recommend matching hangers. Me too. It was important to me that this zone look okay, because it's not closed off at all: this is the first thing you see in our room. (I debated curtaining it off, but it's good for now). I used wooden ones here because there was a bunch of the homeowner’s for us, but I actually prefer those slim velvet lined ones. They save space and your clothes don’t fall off them. If you do go the wooden hanger route (and I do think they look best), the best price I found is at Ikea, for 50 cents each. If you don’t want to go where fun goes to die, Target has a good online price: $13.99 for 24. Pro tip: the price at the store can vary (at my Target in Brooklyn the same pack was $16.59 or some nonsense) so order these online and have them “shipped to store,” by which I mean some Target associate will pull them off the shelves for you and you can usually pick them up within a couple hours of ordering. Update: My super-savvy cousin-in-law informs me that you don't even have to order ahead of time to get online prices in-store at Target; you can just take your items to customer service and they'll adjust. Also, when I wrote super-savvy the first time, I wrote super-savving. I think I just created an Oprah-ism! It works, right?

3.       Unless you have an extraordinary amount of space, you probably have to purge to get your closet to a good place, where it's easy to choose and put away your stuff. Purging is hard for me. I like clothes, and I like holding on to them. Over the past 5 years, I’ve been a full-time employee, a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, a full-time student, and now a blogger - and I’ve got the clothes to prove it.

I hang on to all kinds of stuff that don’t remotely fit my life anymore, because What If. What if someone called tomorrow and said I had a dream job interview/needed to testify before Congress/be interviewed on the Today show about my hot new blog? Wouldn’t I need my ill-fitting, poorly tailored suit from first year law school interviews? Wouldn’t I be glad I had it?

As my Frozen-loving little girl would say, Let It Go.

4.       One way to make that easier: Shift your mindset. This time around, I stared at my closet, unable to pull much into a sell/donate pile. Then I thought to start with absolute "keeps" instead, and that little change really moved things along. I separated out everything I knew I wanted to keep, finding a few definite tosses along the way, and made a big maybe pile.

5.       Set limits to help you purge. I started off with a set number of hangers, and stuck with it. I hung up all my definite keeps, and then sorted down my maybe pile to only those items I had hangers for. A good not-arbitrary limit: only keep what fits in your closet. If you don’t have room for it, it can’t stay.

I don't think you need to purge for the sake of it though. If you have the room, keep your 1999 Gap jeans. But I will say this: it can actually be easier to get dressed when you’ve got less. I took one suitcase with me for our recent 10-week stint in Beijing, and it was remarkably easy to get dressed from a pared down selection.

6.       Organize your clothes in a way that makes sense for your life. My spouse’s clothes are organized most- to least- formal, because it makes sense to have his suits in one spot and his Hawaiian shirts (my man) in another. Mine are organized by type (skirts, shirts, dresses) because I don’t need to separate out by formality. Within type, I do organize by color, because I find it easier to find things that way, but only do that if you feel like it would benefit you and you could stick to it. (Pro tip #57: Don’t adopt an organizing system that brings you stress. That’s not the point).

And that's it. So what do we keep in there? This stuff:

So that's the story of organizing the closet. We'll be back with how we're faring keeping it that way. Anything that works particularly well for you when you go to organize? Any trouble spots?