Every spring and fall the kids' wardrobes go through major overhaul to weed out the seasonal clothing that needs to be stored for passing down and to bring out the clothing that has been graciously passed down.
While I absolutely love the fact that we've been able to clothe all three of our children (with more than enough) and have only had to purchase around 10 items of clothing ourselves, I do not love the inevitable changing of the guard that must happen at least twice each year.
The sorting and organizing clothing that is too small or that may fit again next year is a time consuming process. Although I guess shopping for new clothing is also. And then there's the storing. Oh, the storing. Even with fairly decent sized closets and a little space in the spare room, we are quickly running out of storage space in our home. We have a storage space under the house, but the thought of mildew ruining the clothing and my hard work of sorting makes me leery to place any hand-me-down bins in there.
We'd love to hear your ideas.
Do you use hand-me-downs for your children?
How do you sort and store?
I'll be facing this project in the next few weeks and would love any ideas for making it easier!
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We're still waiting for the arrival of our first little one and I'm already overwhelmed by the clothes so I'd love to read what others do as well. One idea I had is giving some of the clothes that are way out in the future to friends with older babies and then they will give them back later when their babies outgrow them.
ReplyDeleteWith high school kids, my hand-me-down days are over, but I loved "shopping in the crawl space" back in the day! I used cardboard boxes and religiously labeled them, and a couple things I remember finding on command were winter feet jammies and a ski suit.
ReplyDeleteThis tip won't help you now, but it might when you're all done with the hand me downs. I saved EVERYTHING from the baby days, because we had an endless crawl space that was good only for boxes. No standing, no furniture, just boxes. Once we had determined that our baby days were over, I emailed everyone I knew with children younger than mine and invited them to come take what they wanted. I had several memorable days of fellowship with friends, many that I had fallen out of touch with. That was about 5 years ago, and I still remember the gals that came over and how blessed they were to be able to fill their children's closets!