Do You Have Skeletons in Your Closet? (We All Do. Put Them on the Porch.)

It is late September, which means the porches of Baltimore are about to fill up with pumpkins, mums, and skeletons — the cheerful kind, the ones with the plastic grin and the wire pose, waving from porch rockers like they own the block. We love this city in October. And we have a question, asked with all the warmth in the world:

Do you have skeletons in your closet?

Not the metaphorical ones. The actual ones — the box marked "HALLOWEEN" that lives in the back of the closet on the top shelf, wedged behind the comforter you only use when your in-laws visit. The one you open in a hurry every October 1, standing on a step stool with one arm, and close again in November, shoving.

We all do. The skeletons are fine. The system is the problem.

The seasonal closet is a two-closet problem

Here is the thing nobody tells you about fall: your closet doesn't get more stuff in October. It gets two seasons at once. The shorts and the sweaters. The tank tops and the boots. If you just add fall clothing to a summer closet, you get a closet that lies to you every morning — too crowded to see, too full to close.

The fall swap has three moves, and only one of them is fun:

• Out: summer stuff you're done with — sandals, swimsuits, the linen you won't touch again until May. It does not belong at eye level. It belongs in a bin, a guest-room shelf, an under-bed box, or a donation bag if you skipped it all summer.
• Forward: fall stuff that earned its spot — the sweaters you actually wore last year, the boots, the one good coat. Eye level, easy reach, hangers facing the way you can count them.
• Out the door: the true skeletons. The thing you didn't wear last fall either. The costume from a party you left early. Into the donation bag, this week, while the weather agrees with the decision.

And yes — the porch skeletons

Seasonal décor is the closet's sneakiest squatter, because it comes with a holiday attached. The Halloween bins get pulled out with genuine excitement and put back in genuine darkness: mid-Thanksgiving, tired, one shoe in a cobweb. Three tips from every good organizer we know:

• One bin per holiday, labeled on the end facing out. If you have to pull four bins to find the skeletons, that is four bins too many.
• Decorate with the bin, pack with the bin. When the skeletons come down in November, everything goes back in the same box it came out of. Not a mystery tub. The same one.
• The porch is not storage. Get the skeletons out and onto the porch — but when they come down, they go back on the shelf, not behind the coats. The coat that lives behind the Halloween bin all winter is how bins earn their bad reputation.

The ten-minute version

If you do nothing else this week: pull everything summer out of your main closet, put it in one bin, and put that bin on the highest shelf. Put the three things you wore most last fall at the front. That's it. That is the seasonal change-up — a closet that matches the weather outside, which turns out to be the whole trick.

And when the closet itself is the storage problem — a reach-in that can't hold two seasons, a spare room swallowing the bins — that's our whole business. We match Maryland homeowners with vetted closet designers who build systems that fit real seasons, not showroom ones. Tell us about your closet and we'll match you within a business day.

Happy October, hon. Get the skeletons out. Just don't leave them in there with the sweaters.

The Junk Drawer is a weekly blog from BaltimoreCloset.com — an independent concierge matching Maryland homeowners with vetted closet designers. We write about organizing like real people live it.