Prompt Card Example from Declutter Deck®: Coat Closet Decluttering and Organizing
Set your timer for 45 minutes and take a before photo.
How to Organize a Coat Closet — What You're Working With
Coat closets come in two varieties: small and focused, or large and quietly out of control. Many under-stair versions do double duty, packed not just with coats but with overflow from everywhere else in the house — like a second garage. This prompt is designed for both. If you have a small coat closet, you should be able to get through this task in the 45 minutes allotted. If you have a large closet that serves as a catch-all (komono, in the KonMari Method®), plan for extra time or break it into several 45-minute blocks across a few days.
Step 1: Take Everything Out and Make the Pile
Start by pulling everything out. Every coat, every hat, every forgotten umbrella, every thing you shoved in there and meant to deal with later. Get it all into the open so you can actually see what you're working with.
Organizing a Small Coat Closet
I have decluttered both kinds of closets. The small one in my previous house was straightforward. On the top shelf, my husband kept his baseball caps in exactly the order he loved them — those were off limits, and I respected that. I stored one umbrella up there as well. On the rod, we each had our coats separated. He kept lightweight jackets and one heavy coat. Earlier in life he had added sentimental coats to the mix, but eventually he let those go and kept only his essentials, which opened up more room for everything else. My coats hung beside his on wooden hangers sturdy enough for the heavier ones. At the bottom, I placed shoes I wore outside — ones that were always a little dirty and didn't belong with my everyday shoes in the bedroom closet. That was it. Simple, functional, done.
Organizing a Large Coat Closet
Now, the other kind of closet. The vast one that functions as a holding space for everything that has nowhere else to go. I've found that large closets are simply an invitation to store stuff, and for most people this type of coat closet will take significantly longer than 45 minutes. I decluttered one recently, and just taking everything out consumed over an hour.
For that project, we asked the client to hire a babysitter so we could focus without interruption. Inside the closet were three heavy boxes of books, fine china, coats, hats, decorator items, a printer, a baby wagon, Christmas gifts, houseplants in various stages of dying, prints waiting to be hung, cat food, extra clothing, several diaper bags, a child's bicycle, and a rug. Some of it was hard to lift. Some of it was damaged from being packed in so tightly — picture frames cracked, items crushed. As we pulled things out, we filled the entire adjacent den. There was little room to move. And yet, this closet was more organized than most I've seen.
Step 2: Group Your Coats
Working at a fast pace, group like items together. How many red coats does one person need? No judgment. In this client's closet, the proportion of women's to men's coats was dramatically skewed — for every ten coats she owned, her husband had one. And hats. Lots and lots of hats. Grouping showed us the excess and made it obvious which duplicates could be donated. In the event of a tornado — and creating a tornado shelter was actually the purpose of this organizing session — there would have been no interior space to take cover. The closet had to be cleared out.
Step 3: Edit
Keep only the essentials. Most things had to go. We pared the books from over two hundred down to just a few, which went to a homeless shelter where they were used or sold to support services. The china was moved to a kitchen location where the cat could no longer use it as a litter pan. Toys went to the garage along with the wagon. Extra clothes were returned to the bedroom closet. The diaper bags went to a children's shelter. Cat food went into a storage container in the pantry. Every category had a better home somewhere else in the house.
Step 4: Return Everything to Its Place
The best system going forward is to stop using this space as a dumping ground. One way to do that is to designate specific areas of the house for the things that typically end up in a large closet. Another option is to add shelving inside the closet to create real, usable storage. A closet build-out, if it's affordable, makes excellent use of vertical space and allows you to walk in and immediately see everything that belongs there.
One idea that did come to fruition for this client was a small fort in the very back of the closet. She had a little nook at the rear and turned it into a reading corner for her young son — stars on the sloped ceiling, a rug on the floor, a cozy chair, a basket of toys, and a lamp. In the event of a tornado, her son could play there happily for hours. Check out the transformation on our Instagram @lifehackdecks.
Final Step: Adjust as Necessary
Take an after photo. Then call it a day.
(Instructions provided by professional organizers at The Uncluttered Life, Inc.)
About Declutter Deck®
Declutter Deck® is a set of 52 prompt cards that break home organization into focused, manageable tasks — one space at a time. Pull a card, set a timer, and go. Each prompt is sized to fit into a real day, so you always know exactly how to organize a coat closet, tackle a drawer, or clear a shelf without the overwhelm of doing everything at once. Tag us at @lifehackdecks with your before-and-after photos.
If clutter keeps coming back no matter how many times you clear it out, our guide to reducing decision fatigue is a good place to understand why — and what to do about it.
