I have a reach in closet in my spare bedroom/office that I use to store all my cycling gear. Obvious enough I hang my clothes (bibs, jerseys, and any weather variation of those) but I am struggling to find a way to better organize the other bits (think helmets, glasses, caps, tights, warmers and other winter gear) as they all tend to end up in a loose pile on the closet’s high shelf.
Organization ideas?
I admittedly don’t have an amazing system. But it generally looks like 4 fabric boxes each with:
Then helmets and shoes go on a shelf in the basement near my bike. Glasses are there too in their box.
^^ i do similar to mwglow15
I get dressed upstairs then I keep some stuff downstairs next to the bike. Next to the bike I have a kinda cubby-hole cabinet with helmets, shoes, gloves, anything i put on my head / neck. the cubby hole thing makes everything visible and all of this stuff is not super messy. just makes for less clutter with my bike kit.
but yeah no matter what my bike clothing is a mess basically. it’s in a pile cause half the stuff is hard to fold or small or hard to tell apart from other stuff.
on the plus side every now and then I find something I forgot I had and it’s like I got it brand new 
This sounds a bit crazy but it works for me. I get dressed in a room in the basement I have total control over. I have stopped putting my kit away. I have 2 clothes baskets, one for clean and one for dirty. When the clean basket is getting low, I wash the dirty basket then dump the clean stuff into the clean basket.
This workers great for the basics (bibs, jerseys and socks). Specialty items are in designated spots. As I move from indoor to outdoor as the weather changes, the basket naturally resets itself.
Obviously depends on the space you have. I have a walk-in closet, a basement (where the trainer lives) and a basement-adjacent garage (where all the other bikes live).
I keep all base layer stuff in the walk-in closet. That means bibs, jerseys, warmers and HRM. This is also everything needed for a trainer workout; I can get fully dressed in that space and not have to hunt for other stuff. My washer-dryer is right there too, so that makes putting laundry away very easy. I find that wrapping straps/legs around the pad and storing bibs on a shelf is actually much more space-efficient than hanging them.
I keep all other ride gear in my basement. Gloves, jackets, shoes/shoe covers, helmets, glasses. I have a shoe dryer down there too, very useful post-ride here in Seattle. I find the key is to have a designated spot for each type of item and have them visible if possible, e.g. a set of hooks each of which gets a pair of gloves, another set each of which gets a hat, a rack for vests, a rack for jackets/LS jerseys. Post-ride, anything not going in the laundry or on the dryer goes back to its spot immediately.
Throwing everything in bins drives me crazy and leads me to lose things for months at a time before recovering them from the bottom of a bin and going “oh THAT’S where this has been…”
I don’t have pics of my actual setup handy, but the keys to my organization are:
My setup 2 houses ago was nearly identical to chads and what I’m working on recreating in the current house. No closet in my gym so plastic draw system, currently bike-run-winter stuff. Laundry room is right off the gym so I just keep drying rack in there. I had some plastic shelves with ski boots, hiking stuff etc in the old place, about to order a wire cube type thing due to smaller space for this gym just for cycling gear. Currently have tv in an old bookshelf with helmet, shoes etc in it as well.
The 3 wire shelf like Chad has can work well in a closet, don’t make the mistake of assembling it before you test if it can fit in assembled like I did in one of ours… Building it inside the closet sucked, but it works. They are obviously easy to setup and can adjust height semi easily but can also waste space if not quite right the size. We have a closet in what will be my office/overflow guest room off the gym, I need to be able to access the water shut off/water meter so the wire shelves won’t work. Plan to do some horizontal strips of wood up the sides at various heights and build full width/depth shelves in the bottom half for our not cycling outside gear like camping/hiking stuff. I can just take the stuff off and pop off the shelf if needed, and adjust them for different size gear, boots, shoes etc can just stay on the floor and adding a rod across the top for hanging out of season jackets and backpacks. 1 piece of plywood and 2 2x4s will make me 4 shelves.
Aside from my clothes basket system, My basic organizational system revolves around the fact that I am able to keep everything cycling related from my bike and tools down to my socks, nutrition and sunglasses in one room. (I choose to store my bottles and hydration mixes in another room because there is a sink in there).
I didn’t really start out with this as a plan but its ended up that through a combination of shelves, baskets and smallish plastic drawers on the shelves, everything I might need to wear or take with me on a ride is stored in such a way that I can visually scan the room from right to left and check off everything. The same process works even better if I’m packing for a race or travel to ride. In addition to being easy for day to day rides, its almost impossible to forget anything and its easy to track “stock levels” whether its clean socks or spare tubes.
