Day 18 - Kids' Clothes

Welcome back to Day 18 of the 31 Days to a Clutter Free Home series. We're moving onto Kids' Clothes today.

I can not believe how fast our little man, Levi, has grown! He no more than gets into one size till he's ready for the next. In the past year I've learned that if you have too many clothes in one size then he never even wears some of the outfits that get pushed to the back of the drawer.

We were blessed tremendously by friends and family with lots and lots of clothes - new and used, when he was born. One day I took all the clothes and sorted them by size on our dining table. Then I purchased small (about 18" x 15" x 12") clear rubbermaid containers and put the clothes in there by size and labelled the containers. We put the sizes that he would need right away on the top shelf of his closet and put the rest in the attic. Now when he outgrows a set of clothes, I take the next size out of their box (make sure we have enough and buy whatever we might be short on), launder them and put them in the dresser and put the too-small clothes in that box and change out the size label. It has been a very handy system.

I saw that Andrea did something similar here in her small Brooklyn apartment and was featured on IHeart Organizing.

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In fact, the containers she used are identical to the ones I used. She just has a lot cuter labels than I!

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As far as how many items I have in each size...In my opinion, I feel we only need to have at any one time, about 5-6 outfits, 5-6 sleepers, 4 blankets, 2 crib sheets, a handful of socks and maybe 2 pairs of shoes, and a coat. I tend to do laundry every 3-4 days so even if Levi has an accident or something and needs an extra outfit a couple days, we're still fine. We are working with small dresser drawers and a smallish house and don't really have space for more than that anyways. So that's what works for our family. By setting these limits, I am able to edit our belongings very easily. Emotional attachment to the items doesn't really have to be factored in. If I see that we have 12 pairs of pants and only need 5-6, I simply weed out the clothing items that we don't like as well or are stained or slightly worn and donate those (might as well share the love!)or throw them away, if they're that bad. Or if I really like the items, I may box up a few extras for a future child knowing that some of the clothes Levi is wearing now we surely wear out.

We also keep extra diapers, cloth diapers, wipes, socks, shoes and extra bedding in Levi's closet in plastic drawer containers since those items don't fit in the dresser in his room.

Only you can decide what works for your family. But I recommend you take a good look at how many outfits your kids have and how often you do laundry, and come up with an intentional plan.

There's no need to have 12 outfits if you do laundry every 3 days. Probably the 3 favorite outfits will get worn over and over and over and the other 9 outfits will be smashed in the back of the drawer, never to be seen again till the end of the season when you swap out for summer clothes.

Too often when we are busy with work, school, church, life in general...we just go on auto-pilot at home and neglect really putting any thought into these types of things. Then we wonder why we can't even fit the clothes back in the dresser when we get around to putting the clean laundry away or we wonder where are the matching socks are...hehe...

Be sure to check back tomorrow...we'll be talking about reducing TOY clutter!