This is the fifth installment in our series, Homemaking Your Way. Catch up on the first four here.
Clothing. Ugh. Emily did such a great job explaining her “system” for clothes, I really don’t think I can add anything super helpful to the discussion (hence the five day late post…). But I’ll give it a try.
KIDS CLOTHES
Here’s the deal. The Davises have long been our friends and family’s personal Goodwill. We get hand-me-downs like crazy, or at least we used to. When my daughter (my first) was about 2.5 years old, I saw a children’s clothing consignment event advertised on Craigslist and I thought I would quickly go through Audrey’s clothes and try to make some money.
Hours (and I mean HOURS) later, I had what amounts to 6 clothes full of clothing hanging in our basement. My mother-in-law stopped by and after she saw the room exclaimed, “You could push me over with a feather.” It was absolutely crazy.
Since then, I have worked at weeding through the piles and piles of children’s clothing and I finally feel like I have some sort of a handle on things. I realized recently that I was spending way too much valuable time managing all the extra items in our home, including clothing, and the only solution was to get rid of most of it.
The one thing that motivated me to get ruthless on my kids’ clothing was moving our third child, Nathan (3.5) into the “big” kids’ room. I challenged myself to only keep what could fit into their medium sized dresser.
Seven drawers for three kids. It was tough, but I think I succeeded.
Note that I did not fix anything when I took these pictures. I just walked into the mess and start clicking. If I was trying to impress, I would have at least folded the clothes. But I know most of you enjoy real life, so here’s our real life!
Here’s how the dresser is organized:
Each child has one small drawer for socks and underwear. I may be putting their swimming suits in these drawers if and when it ever warms up enough to hit the pool.
They also each have one drawer for pants, tops and shorts.
See? Total chaos.
This has forced me to get rid of a lot of items. And I really want each drawer to be organized enough for each of them to be able to find what they are looking for (work in progress). The boys have a couple of collared shirts for church, but other than that, all of their clothing is everyday wear.
We also have one drawer for pajamas.
It’s a tight fit, as you can tell. The kids oftentimes sleep in their clothes, so we really don’t need or use many PJs.
I really need to work on training these people how to fold clothes. Add it to the list!
Each child has a shoe basket.
I have also worked at having a minimum number of shoe options per person. Ideally I want each person to have one pair of everyday shoes, one pair of rain boots that double as snow boots for the once-a-year blizzard and one pair of summer shoes (sandles or Crocs). My daughter does have a pair of trendy boots and one pair of sparkly shoes for church. The boys just wear their regular shoes to church. I don’t have time to mess with shoes that are worn for three hours a week.
My kids’ closet contains multiple shelves and I do store some clothing in bins in there for my daughter’s dance class gear, her school uniform, soccer shoes and shorts and all of their swimming suits. My daughter’s nice dresses are hanging in my closet.
My youngest, Matthew (18 months), rolls solo in the other room and has a small dresser to himself.
There really are too many items in this dresser, but I am too lazy to get rid of items right now. He also has a shoe box. The plastic bag on the left are all the 18 month clothes that Chunk has grown out of. Great ready, Emily! I have more clothes for ya!
We have just enough clothing to last two weeks if life happens and I have to skip laundry one week. I absolutely love the lack of clothing clutter in the house right now and I really love that we have been able to make three kids in one room work.
As for clothes storage, right now I have a box for each size that I am storing in my closet.
I also have one “grow into” box for my oldest two (the size 5-6 box). If I pick something up that will fit them in the next year or so, it just gets thrown into that box. I also have a “keepsake” box that I am storing clothes I can’t part with — like the first outfit all four of my kids wore right after birth (it’s tiny and from Italy), everyone’s first shoes and some adorable girl clothing that I am saving in case a baby girl gets left on our doorstep. I’m not terribly sentimental, so the box is a bit empty right now!
MY CLOTHES
I won’t speak for my husband when it comes to clothing — he’s content wearing his work shirts and shorts on most days. He is planning to replace his entire wardrobe when the Portland Trail Blazers win a championship, so he’s in a holding pattern right now.
As for me, I did chuckle when Emily wrote about the “the pre-pregnancy clothes, the maternity clothes, the post-pregnancy clothes, and those clothes that you are hanging onto for the day when you lose those last ten pounds.” Currently, I have clothing that spans five regular sizes and four pregnancy sizes (yes, small to extra large) because I get crazy big when pregnant and I don’t lose the weight or mass as quickly as I’d like afterward.
Other than a box that is labeled “Skinny Clothes” I have no organization. It’s just utter mayhem. I am planning to get ruthless on my closet in the next few weeks and figure out what I truly love and get the rest out of my house! I am truly looking forward to moving out of the clothing-holding-pattern phase of life and having a closet with clothes that fit and that I enjoy wearing.
Now it’s your turn! How do you manage your family’s clothing?
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Before I had children, I started up a small business helping people organize their homes. As a frugal person myself, I did this the most cost effective way possible without breaking the bank for either supplies or my fee. I just have a knack for looking at things and seeing the best way they can be arranged. (This does not make me a decorator, that I am not so great at!) I am a firm believer that the less clutter your home is, the less chaotic your life can be. Organization is very relaxing!
Now that I have 2 children, 2 dogs, and an almost full time job with a husband that works out of town EVERY week, I sadly don’t have time for this passion of mine. But I have to say when I look at people’s pictures of their organized clutter, I get the overwhelming desire to come fix it!
I do have to say that keeping the children’s clothes up to date with the seasons and the sizes is definitely an ongoing weekly task. It’s something I both love and hate. I keep 2 bins in each child’s room. One for clothes I buy at the end of each season for them to wear the next year (and hand-me-downs), and the other for outgrown clothes that I either pass down to friends or consign. It can be tedious, but if you stay on top of it, it might on consume 20 minutes per week or every other week, maybe!
I am the mother of 8 mostly grown kids. I also care for my 17-month old grandson on almost a daily basis. What has worked for me for a long time is that each child 5 and up had their own basket on a shelf in the laundry room. I would wash and dry (ok the machines did it) and then I would sort the clothes into each child’s basket. If they needed clean clothes they were in their own basket. If they wanted to put them away (or I made them [about once a month] it was up to them.) If they folded them fine, if they hung them up fine, if not no sweat…the iron is set up all the time for the picky ones and others learned to tumble their wrinkles out in the dryer with a damp washcloth. Socks went into the sock basket and once every two weeks or so someone (usually me) would actually match socks…otherwise they could just rummage in the sock basket if they needed a pair. We did generic socks for awhile until the boys feet (size 15) got so big that their socks stretched out too much for the girls. Then we went to 2 or 3 different generic sock types.
I had 3 rules for the children when it came to going out of the house to either school or church. They are as follows: 1. It has to be clean. 2. It cannot have any STAINS on it (then it is NEVER considered clean) 3. It cannot have any holes in it. I know that the last one caused me the greatest pain in the butt because of the “wonderful” styles concerning blue jeans. I WILL NOT purchase jeans that are ripped out already and you WILL NOT wear jeans that are torn, holey, stained or otherwise unacceptable to the above rules to either school or church. (Jeans are not worn to church except for mid-week youth activities and Boy Scouts).
We also had rules concerning what parts of the body can be on display for everyone to see. No tummys, no bare backs, no short shorts, bermuda are my favs, no tank tops, a t-shirt is fine, no bare chests for boys unless at the pool or lake or the odd shirts and skins game of soccer/basketball. Boy have I been a mean mom! It was very gratifying when my daughter wrote me from her mission in Japan to thank me for never letting her wear immodest clothing. “I did not have to change anything I wore for my mission and it saved me a lot of money too.”
Barb
I have the same #1-3 rules for my son for school and church. Also agree with your modesty standards (and not buying already torn jeans!!). Nice to know I’m not the only one. If you noticed me up above-we also generally get our socks out of the clean laundry basket that generally is in our living room (occasionally I have my son do some matching-sometimes my matching is separating out my light/dark & his light/dark into separate areas of the basket so they are easier to find in the morning!). I have wised up some in recent years and am aiming more now for socks that are all the same-so I don’t have so much unmatched strays! Ideally I would like black socks for my son-but they are hard to find.
Hmmm, your modesty standards sound exactly the same as our’s – and for the same reason 🙂 (when I got married I was thankful for a mom that made me wear modest clothing all my life, so there was nothing I needed to change… Likewise my husband had nothing to change before his mission as well… ).
We have nine children (newborn to 10 yrs) and we organize in a slightly different way than other’s I’ve read so I thought I’d share. We have two bedrooms for the kids – a boy’s room and a girl’s room (we are divided pretty evenly – 4 girls, 5 boys). Instead of the dresser concept for kids (they are NEVER neat and organized) we use the closet heavily. The boy’s clothes go in the boy’s room, the girl’s clothes in the girl’s room. We put up double rods in both closets (one a little higher than normal height and one halfway between that one and the floor). The little boy’s clothes go on the top rod, the older boy’s on the bottom. They fold their pants over the hangers so they aren’t too long. Same with the girl’s closet – with the exception of long dresses – they go in the closet of the extra bedroom (one used for storage) that only has one rod.
When we do laundry (2-4 loads a day and the kids are in charge of that…) when they come down from being hang dried or come out of the dryer, then they are laid out in piles in the hallway nearest the utility room, by child (in order of age). Then the older four children (ages 6-10) put their clothes on hangers right there (and their younger buddy’s clothes) and carry them straight in to their closet and hang them up. No messy drawers! And NO FOLDING!!!
Obviously this doesn’t work for socks and underwear though. In the bathroom we have three drawers of socks – Large, medium and small. I bought, as much as possible, all the same socks in each size so that there isn’t any matching – they can just grab two from the drawer that is their size. It is entertaining when my 2-year old grabs socks from the large drawer… :-).
Underwear is in tubs sorted by small and large for both boys and girls in the cupboards in the bathroom. Occasionally I’ll find interesting things with the kids doing the laundry (like my 2 & 3 year old’s church shirts in the underwear tubs…. But for the most part it works pretty well. I know people are thinking, how do you have all that room in the bathroom drawers and cupboards? It’s because with years of many little hands, I found that there was very little of the normal under the bathroom sink stuff that I really needed in there (the more that was under there, the more it was pulled out and played with!). I have a high shelf in the bathroom that holds things like shampoo, toothpaste, ointments etc… So socks, underwear, some hair stuff the kids can playwith, diapers and rags are the ONLY things within kid reach. Everything is high up (even the garbage can!).
We have dressers in the bedrooms but we use them more as places for special things (each child has a drawer for their special things they want to keep).
My husband and I do about the same thing. We also have double rods in our bedroom closet (but the top one is quite high to leave room for adult clothing). My husband’s clothes go on top, my clothes on the bottom (helps that he’s 6’4″ 🙂 ). He folds his pants over the hangers so they aren’t too long. Underwear and socks go in our one dresser. We have another smaller closet in our room as well that has only one rod and that is where I hang dresses and nightgowns. No folding!!!
I used to be much more organized about my kids clothes and closets/drawers. Now that they are 14 and 11, I fold the laundry (mainly the shirts and pants) and give it to them to put away/hang up. You can imagine where it is. It bugs me to no end, but it is not worth the battle. My son, 14, has one pair of pants he wears everyday. I feel like I have hit the jackpot when I get to wash them. Fortunately they are black. And no they are not jeans – he doesn’t like jeans because they are too stiff.
OMG i am so with you… my 12 year old girl is horrible about putting stuff away properly any more. things get piled on her dresser until she finally gets tired of me reminding (ok, yes, sometimes it’s nagging… 😛 ) her that she still needs to put them away. she has a sock/nylons/tights drawer and an underwear/pajama drawer, but things get soooo mixed up. then she has three drawers of school clothes, a t-shirts/tank tops drawer, a pants/skirts/crops drawer, a sweaters/light zip ups/long sleeve shirts drawer; and then a play clothes drawer. of the remaining two drawers, one is supposed to be for seasonal stuff like gloves, scarves, swimwuits etc, but what ends up being in it are all odds and ends that she doesn’t want to put away in toy bins or on her book shelf when she is cleaning her room. the other has clothes that are a little too big for her still. i try to be pretty good about grabbing stuff that is getting too small as i wash it, but sometimes things slip through, or she gets to them before i do when it’s something she doesn’t want me to get rid of.
the man & i share a VERY small closet of which i luck out enough to get 2/3 of. but then again, he has an 8 drawer dresser where as i only have 6. i figure it works out ok since i have skirts and dresses and he doesn’t. 🙂 i need to be better about going through my clothes and getting rid of things i don’t like/wear, or that don’t fit, but he doesn’t really have that problem, since i think he has MAYBE gained 10 pounds in the 20 years since high school. men suck. lol
I’m ocd about being organized…i swear my calling in life should be a career as a professional organizer. That being said I have always kept my girls closet super organized. They each have a side of the closet, divided by a hanging Ikea shoe organizer that holds my 4 year old’s shoes in the top rows and my 2 year old’s shoes in the bottom rows. To the left hang all my 2 year old’s outfits (yes i pair them all up on hangers lol). After her outfits are her dresses and lastly her sweaters/coats. Same on the right hand side of the closet except with my 4 year old’s stuff. Then in the closet underneath their hanging outfits they each have those plastic bin drawers that hold undies, socks, jammies, and a drawer for mix and match clothes (jeans and shirts that arent matched in outfits). I love it being organized because its always easy for me (or dad) to find an appropriate outfit in a flash!
oh and i have storage totes in the back of their closet to hold my 4 year old’s outgrown things until my 2 year old fits into them. As soon as my 2 year old outgrows something it gets passed on so i don’t keep any of her outgrown things.
As far as my hubby and I. I only keep what fits us. All of our shirts hang in the closet and we have a tall dresser (shared) that we keep sweats, socks, undies, and pants in. I have a shoe organizer on my side of the closet for our shoes. The baby has one dresser in our room with all of his clothes folded in it and i keep the extra drawers in it full of stuff for him to grow into (i love shopping clearance and buying ahead of time!)
@ Danielle- *sigh* I relate to how organized you are… if only because it’s what I aspire to (even if I don’t succeed).
We have a 8 drawer dresser & 5 drawer dresser in our room, and the boys (4 & 1) have a 3 drawer & a 4 drawer in their room. Our dresser has 4L drawers are mine: 1)underware/socks/bras/tights 2) PJs 3) Shirts 4)Pants…I do have nice pre-pregnancy pants, so inconvienently I had gone shopping before getting pregnant…the 1st came a little quicker then we’d expected :/ so they are like brandnew and I’m still dreaming…especially since that was pre #1 pregnancy 😉 The 4R drawers: 1) 4y/o’s clothes 2) 1 y/o’s clothes 3) Hubby’s shirts 4) hubbys pants (both of which being civilian clothes) The 5 drawer dresser holds ALL of my husband’s work clothes 🙁 He once was a mechanic so he has A TON of of yuck oily clothes *actually not as bad as before!* And the rest are his cabinet making clothes 🙁 Did I mention he’s been permanently laid off! A few months now… AND he keeps his clothes in hampers in front of the dressers that he actually wears… ugh. I HATE HIS METHOD!!! I quit doing his laundry after we had our 4 y/o, he’ll be 5 soon so its been nice 🙂 He’s horrible and would have no clean work clothes so he would wear his civilian clothes to work and get them ruined 🙁
To minimize clutter, for the 3 of us anyhow 😉 , I have a rubbermaid container that I keep under the bed for out of season clothes. The boys dressers in their room carry their out of season clothes, but my husband is getting tired of having kids clothes in our room so I’m gonna have to condense soon! Yippee 🙂 We have boxes of 4 y/o’s hand-me-downs in their closet and we haven’t been getting any hand-me-downs for our oldest whose now in 5T- 4/6 clothes. But buying for 1 is considerably easier then 2 😉
Love the honesty! I also really like the idea of purging the clothes. My two boys have more clothes than my husband and I put together. My oldest is not growing quite as fast anymore, but my youngest will be a year in a few weeks and is growing like a weed! I seriously can not keep track of what fits, what he’s grown out of and what he never even wore.
I’m going to do some serious drawer cleaning. I do have them both in one dresser and refuse to have more clothes than will fit, so I guess that’s something. Why I never thought of just getting rid of stuff, who will ever know? Sometimes I just need someone on the other end of the computer to tell me to do it. 🙂
Oh my goodness. We have our house on the market and it’s in “Show Mode” which shouldn’t be too bad except we only have 800 or so square feet so currently my husband and I are sharing his dresser and the closet. I have one (!) drawer that houses underwear, socks, nursing bras, three t-shirts and my one pair of jeans and one pair of pajama bottoms that I kept out of storage rotates. My husband has the other three drawers for T-shirts, socks, underwear and pants. The closet was also purged of half its contents but still has too much stuff in it for my taste. I’m finding that I wear the same 8 outfits so I’m content to keep things as they are for now. My six month old is wearing mostly 6 month clothes but is quickly on his way to the 9 month stuff. He has a lot more room for things and it’s pretty well organized, but that’s only because I don’t have the patience to search for stuff that fits in the middle of the night when his diaper has leaked and his clothes are soaked.
I deal with my son’s sizing up all at once whenever he has a growth spurt. I clear everything out of his closet into boxes to hang onto for a future child, or if it’s not worth saving, goes straight to Goodwill. The next size up gets moved in, even if I have to cuff the pants for a few months. It makes things much simpler to deal with one size at a time, even if a few garments would have fit him a bit longer. For me, luckily enough, I don’t move up and down the sizes too much, even with wide fluctuations in weight, oddly enough. Maybe bc I’m pretty tall. So I just have my normal clothes (some items are close to a decade old and still going strong!) and then pregnancy clothes, which I keep boxed up until needed, and then a few “fat clothes” for when I’m nursing and balloon up like crazy. My hubby’s closet, on the other hand…. for a blue collar guy, he is a total clothes horse!!!
lots of plastic boxes. we have 3 boys- a 4 year old (4t), a 2 year old (2t), and a 8 month old (9-12mo). I keep all the sizes they’re not wearing upstairs in boxes because someone will wear it eventually. also, because we have the room and are the first of our friends/family to have kids- if anything makes it through boy #3 in good shape, i save it. The two oldest share a dresser that looks exactly like yours, including one sock drawer (i buy all the same size and brand for them to share, so there’s no mess with matching). There’s an underwear drawer for the oldest, one drawer with seasonally appropriate dress clothes, and one misc (for hats, gloves, scarves in winter- sunglasses, swimsuits, and babylegs in summer). then they have one drawer of pajamas, one of tops, and one of bottoms. i love the shoe boxes- we use the bottom of a built in shelf but the boxes look more organized.
the husband has a dresser but mostly stacks clothes in front of it, so i sort through it on a regular basis and rotate out some things to be seasonally friendly. i have an odd assorment of clothing (pre-pregnancy, various pregnancy, after-baby, and current sizes included) but most of what is in/on my dresser fits…only because i did a full day of sorting that included trying on everything and donating everything that i knew didn’t work. the maternity stuff stayed though, most of it was given to me by a husband’s cousin to pick through at random. since a good number of us are the same height, the clothes work well for passing on especially since you never know what size you’ll need.
I like your system! It is more on my level and gave me some ideas. I used to be very neat & organized (younger and more energetic), but now we generally get our socks out of the laundry basket! I liked the sock bins in the drawers-I could actually do that. When my son was young I folded everything-even his underwear, now I am lucky if it gets thrown into his sock/underwear drawer-along the way I realized that really didn’t matter & I needed to focus on things that did (don’t fold mine anymore either-I do get it out of the laundry basket which hangs out in the living room in case anyone comes over & it would be embarrassing! My son is 12 now & would be embarrassed also if either of ours were seen also).
I have a grow into box also & my big accomplishment lately is working more on getting rid of things we really don’t like/doesn’t fit well & really won’t wear. I try to get that out of the closet the minute I figure it out and have been working on trying on my old clothes to weed them out. I agree a smaller amount of clothes that you really wear, makes more sense than the stuff that just has lived in the closet for years.