Storing Children's Clothes and Shoes
I am organizing, culling, and storing my children's clothes that they've outgrown, in case we need them for future babies. Over the past two years (the years child #3 has been around to date) the clothes have been piling up in all our bedrooms, depressing me more and more every day. When I decided it was time to declutter the house, finally dealing with the children's clothes was at the top of the list.I began by gathering everything - mostly baby and little kid clothes, but also a few related items such as blankets, slings and baby carriers. I went through the dressers and pulled out all the too-small clothes, not bothering to make decisions about donating, tossing or keeping at this point. I just wanted to get them all down to the kitchen and dining room, which is my staging ground for this project. Soon I had several clothes baskets that looked like this:
My husband and I then scrounged up every big plastic storage bin we had in the house. I washed them with hot soapy water, then set them out all over the kitchen island and dining room table. I stuck a quickly scribbled note indicating clothing sizes and gender, stuck them on the bins (two sizes per bin) and these became the "keep" piles. I filled up several garbage bags and boxes for donation, which were soon loaded into the car and taken to Goodwill. Several articles of clothing were relegated to the garbage as well.
This was the view in my kitchen and dining room when I started sorting out the clothing I planned to put in storage:
At first I was really torn between culling and keeping clothes. My first instinct was to get rid of as much as possible... the shear enormity of the piles made me think, we cannot possibly store even half of this, with more hand-me-downs being generated every year. However, the financial aspect soon struck me: this is a fortune in clothes. If anything is in pretty good condition, I should keep it. It will save our family major moo-la someday.
I am now much further along on this project, so I'll take some more pictures and demonstrate what I've learned about conserving space while storing lots of children's clothes.
