Changing clothes out for the seasons……

Posted by Laura on May 12, 2008 · 44 Comments

Clearly my daughter has gone through a growth spurt. These are the clothes that no longer fit:

Twice a year (spring and fall) I go through the kid’s clothes. This past weekend it was my daughter’s (11) turn. Here’s what I do. I go into her room, I dump every drawer as well as the clothes from her closet into the middle of the floor and then get her to try on every.single.thing. Oh how I love to torture her this way, such fun it is! Really all the mumbling and grumbling it’s so beautiful. Anything that doesn’t fit or she doesn’t wear (grrr) gets piled onto another pile in her room.

So even though we went through all the spring/summer clothes back in the fall when we put them away, we went through and tried them all on again to be sure they still fit which they didn’t. We also went through and tried on all the fall/winter clothes before storing them away because anything that is bordering on too small and not going to fit next fall also goes into the out pile as well. Her growth spurt over the last six months means that most of her fall clothes aren’t coming back next year and many of her spring/summer clothes that we thought would fit this season won’t. Hence the ginormous pile above. Poor thing will now have to endure a shopping day with her mom, did I mention she hates shopping? What’s with that?!

After the torture session clothes trying on session I tackled the “out pile” and sorted it into 4 smaller piles, thrift store, two consignment store piles and garbage. Consignment stores generally only take in season clothing so I split the pile into spring/summer consignment and fall/winter consignment. The spring/summer stuff goes into one tote and put by the door ready to go and the fall/winter stuff goes into another tote and put away in the closet until it’s time to take it in. The thrift store stuff goes directly to my donation station.

In between seasons I keep the consignment totes in my younger son’s closet and continue to add to the applicable totes throughout the year. So in my son’s closet I have a spring/summer tote, a fall/winter tote and a wicker laundry basket. I use the laundry basket as a place to throw the outgrown clothes until I’m ready to sort them into the other two totes :)

The clothes that are too big I hang up in the closet by size.

I just try to keep it as simple as possible. Sometimes I think people make things more complicated than they need to be and then wonder why they don’t use the system. And be honest with yourself about the time and resources you have to manage your system. For instance, I use to do an Ebay pile as well, but gave that up when I realized my pile was sitting there untouched for months on end. Apparently the time it took to list everything just wasn’t worth my time so rather than beat myself up about it not getting done I just dropped it and moved on.

Now it’s your turn…what is your clothing system and does it work? Why or why not and what I really want to know is does anyone else love to torture their kids as much as I do?

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Clothing storage for kids