Childrens Clothes Storage Bins and Bags
In my children's clothes adventures, I have completed the process of gathering all the too-small clothes, culled out the ones to donate or throw in the trash, and having belatedly decided that I really DO have to wash all these clothes before putting them into long-term storage (more on that later), I am discovering the best way to store children's clothes.
Short of buying specially-made archival bags and containers, I believe I have the best solution right at hand. We have collected a number of plastic storage bins (Sterlite, Rubbermaid and others) and have been piling clothes and other unsorted and undecided-about items in them for years. But as the Flylady says, "You can't organize clutter" and these bins were just containers of clutter. It was easy to recover the ones that were holding unsorted clothes in them. Others I found in the garage with a couple of tools in them (soon relegated to the workbench where they should have been, though the workbench itself is a study in clutter collecting), and another was being used for surplus hat and mitten storage. I decided the hats and mittens were part of the clothing project, since some were baby-sized, so that bin was emptied out too and is now available for long-term clothes storage.
Here is a look at one of the clear plastic conainers I am using for the boys size 5 and 6 clothes:
The advice I found online recommended not only using bins, but placing the clothes inside of plastic bags before putting them in the bins. There are apparently two reasons for storing clothes in plastic bags, or Space Bags, within a plastic bin:
- Increased protection from moisture, dirt and insects
- To squeeze out the excess air and increase the amount of clothes that can be stored in the plastic bin/storage container.
But which is better for bagging up clothes for storage, Space Bags or ordinary garbage bags? I have found a use for both:
I think the Space Bag is easier to use when you have an impossibly large stack of the clothes that you want to compress to a height small enough to fit under the lid of the plastic storage container. I had a lot of size five boys clothes for some reason, but the Space Bag fits on one side of the container, leaving the other side free for the size 6 clothes. The size 6's were placed in a tall kitchen can garbage bag, and I leaned on it and squeezed as much air out as I could, then sealed it shut with packing tape. It made a nice brick of clothes that fit easily along side the size 5s, so I could get two years worth of clothes into one bin.
Here is another look of a couple years worth of clothes compressed in their plastic bags and sealed with packing tape:
By the way, I did not separate the clothes into seasons, as I know some people do. So far I have not seen the need to store away summer clothes in the winter, or vice versa. I have kids who like running around the house in shorts and T-shirts in the middle of winter, and on the other hand I sometimes have to dress them in jeans and sweatshirts in June. If your climate has a sharper division between the warm and cold seasons, you might want to store the clothes separately to make it easier to grab just the ones you need when you need them. I also don't have that many clothes saved that it would be difficult to pull out what I need and reseal the bag with the rest of them if I wanted to.
My only problem is that I keep coming across additional clothing items in the sizes I've already sealed up. I'll have to re-do those bags, but I can handle it. I am making progress toward having a nicely stocked supply of clean kids clothing ready for future children, God willing.
