Every woman knows the sinking feeling when she yanks open her wardrobe door and is faced with a jumble of clothing, or worse still, the entire contents falling out on her. But hold fast. We guarantee that following our plan will enable you to make serious inroads into the jumble. You will have additional bonuses by discovering that clothes you’d have forgotten you had will be useful for your friends and other charitable institutions, even the homeless family down the road will very likely benefit from the clean up. And the greatest incentive of all, you’ll discover gaps in your wardrobe that will require delicious shopping expeditions to fill.

Prepare to prune: Go to your neighborhood ‘baniya’ and get your hands on four big cartons. Write dump on one, give on another, and repair on the fourth. Have a few large transparent plastic bags at hand. Now pull every last inhabitant of that fabric jungle onto your bed.

Divide and be cruel: Remove all the clothes you know you never want top wear again, putting them in the dump or give boxes. Next consider those that no longer fit. Be ruthless, if you’ve been trying top get back into them for a over a year, it might be wiser to buy new clothes when you lose or gain weight, rather than hang on to these. Divide them into the dump and give boxes. Try on each of the clothes you plan to place in the keep box. Ask yourself how you feel when you wear the piece. Toss the clothes that need alterations, darning or have buttons to be replaced into the repair cartoon.

Sort the survivors: By now you should have a considerably whittled down pile of clothes in the keep box. Now, work out the system by you can best place the chosen to hang clothes by color, or keep similar clothes together.

Stash clothes you rarely wear away on the highest shelves, alongside seasonal and traveling clothes. Factor in space to keep accessories handy and untangled. If your closet is not optimized for efficiency, there is now a whole range of accessories available that will make the most of your space. Hanging clothes shelves, tie racks and special hangers make great use of vertical space.

Last things last: Move the clothes in the dump box into the large plastic bags and keep these ready for removal or collection. Move the give box into another room for further sorting.

Open the doors of your closet and put together the outfit you need in five minutes flat….