Keep Your Closet Smelling Fresh With This Newspaper Hack

In an ideal world, your clothes closet is a streamlined home for wrinkle-free clothes waiting to be worn, shiny shoes eager to take you to fascinating places, and your favorite bags and accessories ready to show off your unique style. When you swing open the door, the inside of your closet could be a respite, a haven of organization in defiance of a chaotic world (and we have 15 budget-friendly ways to organize it even more). To keep it feeling like a relaxing space, it should also smell delightful. If it doesn't, the musty odor is most likely coming from your shoes. Luckily, there's an easy way to diminish these stenches, and it involves using newspaper. 

You can't help the fact that your feet have over 250,000 sweat glands and that you can easily sweat through your socks into your shoes. That moist environment, in combination with the dead skin cells we shed, creates a home for bacteria growth. This creates the odors in our shoes that open up the stink faucet in our closets. For a fresh-smelling closet, adding crumpled-up sheets of newspaper is an easy, inexpensive hack.

All you need are sheets of newspaper, which you will crumple into balls and place inside your shoes or in the corners of your closet. If you're going to add them to your shoes, you should first let your pairs completely dry if they've recently been worn, then ball up some pages of newsprint and stuff your shoes with the paper. Newspaper absorbs odors and will absolutely help keep your closet smelling fresh. Although you'll need to check in your local area, most newspapers are compostable too, making this hack environmentally low-risk. And, if you have strong odors in your fridge, newspaper could work to banish odors there, too.

We want to offer a bonus tip here. As a way to power up your odor removal, consider also adding some baking soda to your shoes, particularly athletic shoes. Shake it all around the inside of your shoe and let it sit, then add the crumpled newspaper. When you're ready to wear them again, remove the paper, shake out the excess powder, and you're good to go. Repeat these steps as needed for a fresher-smelling closet.