I can’t tell you exactly when I got into organizing my clothes, and my system has gone through different iterations over the years. One thing that hasn’t changed for as long as I can remember: my strong distaste for wire hangers. I remember one summer, as a teen, watching the old Faye Dunaway movie Mommie, Dearest on AMC. It’s a terrible film, and one of the worst scenes is when the tyrannical Joan Crawford beats her adopted daughter while screaming, “NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!” It’s intense, and while I would never get that worked up about a hanger, I understand the sentiment to an extent. I shudder whenever I go through my husband’s closet and find a shirt still hanging on one of those blasted pieces of metal. “No more wire hangers,” I trill jokingly, though every joke is a little bit true. I have a similar hatred for the thick, plastic hangers that also fill his closet (I prefer the crystal style ), but I can’t justify the expense of replacing all of our hangers. One day...A year ago, I became obsessed with finding a solution to my shoe problem. We had no proper shoe storage; everything just ended up in a pile in a corner or a random bin, and it was unsightly. I spent hours researching shoe storage options — when I get an organizational idea in my head, I will not let it go. I fantasized about having a walk-in-closet that could house my growing collection (impossible in a one-bedroom apartment). I would linger on the Elfa page on the Container Store website and imagine spending thousands of dollars to completely redo my closets just to accommodate my shoes. (We have custom shelves for my husband’s CD collection. One could argue my shoes are worth more.) In the end, I settled on simple shoe racks that fit in the bottom of two of our closets — one for me, one for my husband. It’s the best $60 I’ve spent in a long time. Though I’m still dreaming of those Elfa shelves. Someday...Last spring, when I was going through a bit of a hard time, I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, because I needed some magic and some life-changing. The book didn’t fix my generally messy life. Despite her good advice, I refuse to part with the two shoeboxes full of ticket stubs from every concert, movie, and play I’ve ever attended with my husband. But I was inspired by her trick for folding clothes . Suddenly, my dresser drawers were as beautifully organized as my closet. Kondo's special folding technique saved me a whole dresser drawer that I now use whenever I need to haphazardly hide away one of those other miscellaneous piles before company comes. But better than the extra storage is how all of my shirts and pants and underwear now seem to stand at attention, waiting for me to choose them each day when I get dressed.