Next to a closet, a dresser can be the ultimate storage hero. But with all the room available in a drawer-filled hulk of furniture, there’s also ample opportunity for clutter to accumulate. Wide-set or deep drawers can easily swallow up socks or smaller pieces, while digging for a single shirt can turn your garments into a knotted pileup. With all of that in mind, we turned to professional organizers for their tried-and-true hacks for banishing clutter from this bedroom staple — for good. 

Ready to set up your dresser for success? Begin by clearing out every drawer to get a better idea of what you’re working with. Donate or toss out items you no longer wear or need, and arrange the rest into subcategories, advises Katrina Hassan of Spark Joy London. For example, separate intimates, pajamas, T-shirts, and exercise clothes. Now you can visualize how and where you can best store each grouping. “It’s common when you complete this part of the process to find items that shouldn’t be there,” says Hassan. “If these items already have a storage location in your home, return them to their correct place.” 

Once you’ve gone through everything, clean each drawer with a damp cloth to freshen it up, and allow it to dry thoroughly before putting anything back in. 

“Consider the dresser drawer contents as a reflection of the order in which you dress your body,” says Hassan. Fill the top drawers with items you put on first, such as undergarments and socks, then reserve the bottom drawers for items you put on last. Depending on how many drawers you have in your dresser, you can designate each to one or two categories, she says. “The key to effective organization and maintaining it is to create a simple system.” 

As much as possible, avoid storing heavy and dense fabric in your dresser, says Laura Kinsella of Urban OrgaNYze. “They don’t breathe well, are hard to get out, and simply put, take up too much space.” So if you have room in your closet, let thicker sweaters and jeans live on the shelves above your hanging space while keeping dresser drawers available for lighter pieces like T-shirts and workout leggings. 

If you’re working with a dresser that has extra wide or deep drawers, it can be helpful to bring in a little reinforcement. Professional organizer and productivity consultant Rashelle Isip of The Order Expert recommends using drawer dividers or separators to create structure within your given dimensions and help prevent neatly folded clothing from shifting or falling over when you open a drawer. “Plus, you can clearly see where the front and back sections of the drawer begin and end, making it less likely that items will be pushed, lost, or squished towards the back of the drawer,” she says. Isip advises creating at least three to four sections in an extra-wide drawer to keep items contained and in line. 

When storing clothing within drawers, eliminate layers and file your clothing instead, says professional organizer Sangita Evans of Clear and Hear. Folding and filing items next to one another both makes it easier to see what you have and prevents the inevitable mess that can arise from having to sift through stacks of clothing. With visibility on your side, you’re less likely to “lose” items or forget you ever owned them and more likely to pull them out without making a mess. 

If you prefer to store your clothes in layers, be selective about what you put on the bottom, says Hassan. Relegate out-of-season clothing or less frequently used items for the base layer so that the pieces you use daily can live on top. Hassan’s ingenious trick for this? Use acrylic boxes for each group. When the seasons change, all you have to do is swap the boxes around. “Effectively, using this technique, you create two drawers in one,” she says. 

Color-coding clothing in your drawers may seem like a superfluous step but, in truth, it can help keep things visually cohesive and, therefore, easier to track. For Kinsella, it’s all about functionality with the bonus of aesthetics. “When you divide by color, you have a smaller section to assess — like when you’re hunting for the perfect white tee in the morning — which can streamline your routine,” she says. Plus, it can give you a visible hint for when you may need to do laundry.

It can be tempting to try and squeeze in every item of clothing without a home into your drawers, but “a dresser, like any container, will only hold so much,” says Isip. In order to make sure you don’t jam your drawers or find items behind the dresser months later, “only place what can comfortably fit into a dresser,” says Isip. “Leave at least a 1-inch gap from the top of the side of the drawer to be safe.” (If you have more clothes than dresser space, she suggests placing off-season items in airtight containers and storing them under your bed.)

And once you choose a dresser organization method or structure that works for you, stick with it, says Isip. “It’s easier to follow and maintain a single method, rather than changing or modifying methods every week or month.”

Apartment Therapy’s Laundry, Sorted vertical was written and edited independently by the Apartment Therapy editorial team and generously underwritten by Samsung.

While I’d consider myself a pretty neat person, I do have one clutter-filled space in my home: the laundry chair. 

You know the one: that beautiful, decorative chair you splurge on for the corner of your bedroom. It’s sleek, it’s sophisticated, it makes you feel like the has-it-all-together lead heroine in a Nancy Meyers flick — and it’s truly impeccable at collecting clothing. Or maybe it’s a laundry bench, like my friend has, or a laundry stool, which I owned in my last apartment. The furniture item can differ; it’s the practice that’s the same. 

For me, I’m not even sure how it happens; I toss a shirt onto it that I’ve decided against for dinner, or jeans I only wore once (They aren’t dirty!), and before I know it, half my closet is piled high on this “decorative” chair. Soon, there’s no discerning what’s dirty and what’s clean, giving me no choice but to eventually just throw everything into the wash with a huff after my husband side-eyes that corner a few times. 

For others, the laundry chair might be the go-to destination for a newly-clean load you grab out of the dryer and plan to fold that day — before you get sidetracked and end up picking clothes out of the chair pile throughout the next week until you’ve inadvertently whittled it down to just a few items.

And this is the very important thing: I am not here to break you out of your laundry chair habit. Heck, I’m not even sure if I can break myself out of my laundry chair habit. But I’m all about little improvements, and according to the organizing pros I talked to for this article, the key to at least enhancing your laundry chair habit lies in turning it into a pseudo-organizing mechanism that works for you, rather than against you. Here’s how to do that.

“If you’re committed to having your laundry chair, or you’re just finding it difficult to ditch it, I want you to establish rules for yourself,” says Kenika Williams, a professional organizer and owner of Tidied by K. One potential rule you might consider, she says: taking 10 minutes each night to tidy a few things on the chair to help avoid a mountainous buildup of clothing. “What ‘organization’ looks like to every person will differ, and you get to establish your own rules that will align to your organizational goals,” Williams says.

Similarly, Naeemah Ford Goldson, a professional organizer and owner of Restore Order, suggests coming up with a time limit for how long laundry can remain on the chair. “I’d recommend no longer than a day, so you can get into the habit of putting everything away before you go to bed at night,” she says.

An important caveat for having a laundry chair: It must be functional, says Williams.

A laundry chair shouldn’t be the place for both clean laundry and five-times-worn sweatshirts,  according to Ford Goldson. Her recommendation: “I would suggest only putting clean clothes on the chair, because who wants to mix their dirty and clean clothes?” 

To make the tip above happen, you can keep the chair around but also work to bring in other organizational strategies to tempt you away from the siren call of the laundry chair for all items. 

“Try a clothes rack that is standalone and equip it with empty hangers so it’s much easier to hang clothes quick,” suggests Katrina Green, professional organizer, interior stylist, and owner of Badass Home Life. “This still gives you the system of separating the already worn clothes from fresh ones, and it’ll also give you more of an aesthetically pleasing look. Another option would be to have a blanket ladder or a coat rack so you can still keep stacking items, but it’ll lessen the number of clothes you’ll be hanging since space is limited.”

Ultimately, says Ford Goldson, “There should be a place for dirty laundry and a place for clean laundry, whether it’s a hamper in your closet or a clean clothes basket in your bedroom. When every item has a home, you’re less likely to put it in places it doesn’t belong.”

Apartment Therapy’s Laundry, Sorted vertical was written and edited independently by the Apartment Therapy editorial team and generously underwritten by Samsung.