How to Tidy Up Kids’ Clothing
/Day 3: Kids’ Clothing
Cleaning out the kids’ closet was more overwhelming than I thought it would be. I have to say...I didn’t think I had bought them so many clothes until I created my “mini me” kid pile!
What made this experience fun was that my oldest toddler wanted to “help mommy” and tidy everything. He even said “What a big mess!” as he’s piling on clothing to the already crazy pile.
What made this experience a bit frustrating was that, while it was great my toddler wanted to help, it slowed me down because he wanted to try to fold everything... in...his...own...way. Teaching a 5 year old is worse than trying to teach your dog a new trick. Okay...that was probably horrible of me to say haha. God bless his little heart trying to fold all his Mickey underwear. But probably after the 5th one, he forgot the method and starting doing his own thing! It took everything inside of me to not try to fix it (hence what you see in the photo is 90% his folding haha).
Folding
I found that Marie Kondo’s folding technique has to be amended with kids’ toddler clothing. Instead of THREE folds, I only do TWO to make it into a rectangle. Sometimes instead of folding into THIRDS, I fold the sides of the shirt to the CENTER of the shirt and then HALF, then HALF again. This seems to work quite well. Another trick is to put the shirt design FACING BOTTOM so that when you fold it up, the print shows (especially if you have a lot of shirts the same color, you can’t tell which is what with Kondo’s folding technique.
Socks I only fold in half ONCE. But underwear and pants same rule applies as “adult” folding. I also folded a lot of swimwear and cold weather clothing and fitted it into drawers.
Storage
I reused our plastic drawers we already had (see “before/after photos) to store the kids’ clothing. This is because it gives them freedom to pull out what they want to wear and is the right size for them. Most of the adult shoe boxes didn’t fit inside these smaller drawers, so I used Kid’s shoe boxes (how novel!) to make the “bento boxes”. I also found 3-Section Adjustable Twill Drawer Organizer Cocoa and Narrow Twill Drawer Organizer Cocoa that were PERFECT for organizing their little clothes!
After tidying up this area, ended up with 1 garbage bag worth of clothes and a clear bin of saved clothes for a potential #3 baby.
Total time: 8 hours
