How to Make a Bed in 7 Steps (and Have It Look Effortlessly Stylish)

Professional home organizers are fond of saying that the simple act of making your bed every day can go far in maintaining a tidy space. And darn it, they’re right. Even if you still have half the floor covered in dirty laundry, a neatly made bed can transform the look of the room in just a few minutes — even though, yes, you should still consider doing laundry at some point.

To build the habit of making your bed every day, it helps to start with a properly dressed bed in the first place. Here, Katie Dills, brand president of The Cleaning Authority, explains her process of making a bed, including how to wrangle a fitted sheet without giving up.

Is there such a thing as too many pillows for a bed? Not if you arrange them correctly. Here’s how to do it like a pro.

Feel free to experiment with the arrangement of decorative pillows in front of the standard pillows. And remember: Karate chopping your pillows is a personal preference, not a requirement.

Not everyone is a fan of using the hospital corner method, aptly named because that’s how beds are made in a hospital. This includes my husband, who complains the tucked-in flat sheet “suffocates his feet.”

Well, I happen to be very much on team hospital corners. It’s the way my mom taught me how to make the bed and old habits die hard. But to make my husband happy, I tried laying the sheet over the bed and simply adding the comforter without any tucking in. Aside from it feeling just plain wrong, the sheet never stayed put. Every morning, one of us had to basically redo the entire bed.

So I came up with a solution that works for us: I tuck the bottom of the sheet and make hospital corners on my half of the bed. I let his half of the bed “go rogue,” as I call it, which makes him and his feet happy. To make the bed the next day, all one of us has to do — yes, we do trade off on this task — is smooth out the bottom of his side of the bed, which only takes seconds because my side is still tucked in nicely.

Not a fan of hospital corners, either? Not a problem. Dills says they’re not mandatory — especially if you like a more relaxed look to your made bed. 

“The key is to make your bed in a way that feels comfortable and visually pleasing to you,” Dills says. “However, if you love a clean look and prefer to be tightly tucked in bed at night, then hospital corners are an easy decision.”