Spotlight Features
How to Organize Hand-Me-Down Clothes – Guest Blogger: Brittany Bullen
A big welcome to guest blogger, awesome mama and social media extraordinaire, Brittany Bullen! She’s with us today sharing some great tips and tricks to keeping those kiddo closets in order. And once your hand-me-downs are ready for sale, be sure to check out Using Your Resources: How to Resell Your Used Items and Buy Second Hand and How to Store and Prepare Your Used Items for Resale for the next steps to the craze that is kiddo wardrobes.
Looking for the easy button for how to organize hand-me-down clothes for multiple kids– without pulling your hair out? Look no further, people!
Now that we’re on our third boy, we’ve finally got this clothes organization thing down to a science. Here are some easy steps you can follow to set up a storage system you’ll love to use for years to come.
1. Invest in a fabric box storage system. Mine is from ikea and I can’t say enough how much I love it! More on that later.
2. When you can afford it, buy more of the same kind of storage system. I know this might sound like a lot, but we currently have 20 separate boxes of clothes in the rotation.
3. Choose your “current size” box placement for the kids’ room. Our 8-box shelf is organized as follows: Top Row– underwear, 5T shirts, 18m shirts, dress clothes. Bottom Row– socks, 5T pants, 18m pants, Jammies.
4. When the kids outgrow a size, squeeze all of the outgrown clothes into the same kind of fabric box. I have a rule that we don’t keep any more clothes than we can fit into one box, the ikea fabric boxes are the perfect size for this. Put an index card with the size on top of the clothes so you can identify it quickly.
5. Put the boxes not currently in use in a place other than the kids’ room, but preferably not too far away or you’ll never want to rotate them. Ours are in the hall closet next to the boys’ room. That way, when we need a new size, we just switch out the boxes. Easy as that!
It’s taken us 6 years to figure it out, but I can definitely say that this is the best, easiest, most efficient system we’ve used and we’ll be sticking with it.
What tips do you have for keeping your kids’ clothes organized? Leave them in the comments!
Brittany lives with her husband and three sons in Utah. She is a playwright, composer, actress, singer, thrift shop lover, Mormon and aspiring vegan. She is the founder of the International Bloggers Association, is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and the Cognitive Behavioral Society (’cause why not). Brittany has a B.A. in English-Writing from Denison University and has an imaginary Ph.d. in Googling stuff she wants to know. You can keep up with her at BrittanyBullen.com.
Continue Reading
Brittany Bullen
August 2, 2014 at 1:17 am
Thanks for publishing this for me, Katy! Come write for me any time!
Katy Blevins
August 5, 2014 at 9:28 am
You know I would love to!!! We’ll have to chat more about that!