I Won the Battle Against My Closet, and All It Took Was a Trip to The Container Store

This story is a part of New Year, New You, a package devoted to small, low-stress home improvement projects that, with a little effort, will dramatically improve your life.

"Every journey begins with a single step." You hear this phrase often, particularly at the start of the year when journeys frequently begin. Heard about less often is the fact that some journeys end pretty much immediately after that very first step.

This can be because the journey proved itself too difficult, like when you thought you could apply stick-on wallpaper or install a sconce. It can also be because the journey, which you have avoided for years, never allowing your mind to dwell on it for more than a few moments due to the intense stress brought on by the mere thought of tackling it, turns out to have been doable in under an hour.

This is the story of my very short journey to fix the underwear drawer I couldn’t close due to it being overstuffed, and to fix the area of my closet where I kept my sweaters, pajamas, and sweatpants, which would topple every time I removed one of those items in a way that was infuriating.

Identifying my problem, and my potential solutions

I can’t remember the last time I had an underwear drawer that could close with ease. This is potentially because my underwear drawer is not exclusively an underwear drawer but instead an underwear, socks, tights, tank tops, bras, and ephemera drawer. It is packed full of things, and every day I have to rifle through all of those things to find the one thing that I need. There’s a scarf in there, for example, and also an empty eyeglass case. Why? I don’t know. My husband has a drawer exclusively for socks. He has one entirely dedicated to underwear. I do not know how he has afforded himself these luxuries, as we have matching dressers, but I have seen it with my own eyes and know it to be true. If I had his warlock-like ability to have entirely separate drawers for my socks and underwear and still be able to fit the rest of my clothing into my dresser, well, my problem would be solved. Sadly, I do not. Instead I must look to The Container Store.

There, I acquired this expandable three-drawer organizer, and also this larger drawer organizer. One of these somewhat randomly chosen things, I thought, must be the key to an organized drawer and, eventually, inner peace.

I also had the problem of my sweaters, pajama sets, and sweatpants area to attend to. These items exist not in my dresser, but in a shared Ikea wardrobe left by the former tenants of my apartment, which I cannot find online but which is sort of like this one. Half of it is for hanging clothes, the other half is made of pull-out bins and large empty cubbies, possibly intended for bed sheets or towels, and primarily used for those things, except for the lawless and vast cubby dedicated to my toppling clothing. For this, I was tipped off to a drawer-based clothing organizing system available on Amazon by a friend who had a similar problem. I promptly lost that link and—either instead, or as directed—bought this one, and also this. Was either of those the thing she recommended, or were they both merely something similar and maybe worse? I will never know. But only time would tell if they’d help my predicament.

Making difficult choices

While I waited for my purchases to arrive, I dumped all of my clothing out in order to assess what I could get rid of and what I would take to my grave. Immediately I realized I should have done this after my purchases arrived. Then I would have somewhere nice to put all of my things, which were now on the floor. Whoops. (What we are learning now is that perhaps my problem is not an excess of underwear and socks, but an overall inability to plan and organize.)

Regardless, I got rid of several pairs of hole-ridden socks and tights, the pairs of underwear that were held together by threads, a few gross tank tops, some of the pajama shirts I never really wear, and a few sweaters that never looked good on me but which I couldn’t part with in case I one day looked completely different and would need them. Goodbye, my old friends. These erstwhile belongings were split into throw away and to be donated piles.

Learning how to fold

Sometimes you think you know how to do something until you see someone else do it. Then you realize you are worthless and have acquired no knowledge throughout your many miserable years on our dying planet. This is how I felt after I examined several folding tutorials on TikTok. Basically every one of them that I could find involved laboriously turning your underwear into a tiny eggroll. The eggroll method, I was unhappy to see, had also infiltrated sock folding. This method is just too complicated and I will never do it. Thinking it might be a generational thing, I looked away from TikTok and towards something more for people of my advanced age: WikiHow.

A page titled "How to Fold Panties" told me how to fold them into a nice square shape, which was basically what I was already doing except a little neater. The "How to Fold Socks" page was not of much help, but it did inspire me to roll my socks without folding over the cuffs, because, as the comments warned, that might stretch them out. Thank you, WikiHow.

Assigning places to my new organizational tools

Well, The Container Store expandable three-drawer organizer, though sturdy and surely the key to a change in someone’s life, did not fit into my dresser. It did fit into my sweater cubby, but the drawers, expandable as they were, did not expand to an extent that would hold sweaters and sweatpants adequately.

Luckily, the other haphazardly purchased organizational system—"Drawer Organizer Clothes Set of 12 Grey - Dresser Organizer For Nursery, Bedroom, Closet - The Perfect Baby Clothes Organizer and Storage & General Nursery Organization or Dresser Drawer Organizers"—was quite useful for multiple drawers in my dresser, and particularly the underwear one. I used three of its medium-sized gray boxes to separate my socks, my tank tops and bras, and my underwear. Newly folded into their easy-to-handle shapes, it all fits. I can see where everything is. I can open and close my drawer without frustration. Now, when I put my clean clothing back into the drawer, I can take each box out and refill them. Setting it up was easy, and I should have done it many years ago.

For my sweaters, sweatpants, and pajamas, I used The Container Store’s "Large Drawer Organizer" between two of these segmented storage bins. In the bins, I was able to store each of my sweatpants and each of my pajama sets separately, in an easily accessible and visible way. In the large drawer organizer, I rolled up and tucked in three of my most-used sweaters. Behind the organizers, I hid the rest of my sweaters—and that is between me and God.

Will I be able to keep up my new organized lifestyle?

I’d like to say that now that I have my organizational system in place, I’ll keep these two headache-inducing clothing areas tidy, and that whenever I need to pick out a pair of underwear I’ll no longer feel the desire to enter one of those rooms where you put on goggles and smash things. Knowing myself, I’m not sure how long it will last. But I will try. Because, as you know, every journey begins with a single step.

Top image via Getty Images

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