Friday, May 27, 2011

Weak Things Become Strong - FINALLY!

For the last ten years, I have been fighting with clothing. I can sort and organize a million coupons but clothes were kicking my trash. Keeping track of the sizes, the seasons, what's stained, what matches, what to save, etc. just makes my head spin and I would literally shut down.

Recently we were handed 8 bins of clothing. A wonderful blessing, but a mental nightmare for me. I made DH literally sit right by me to help me and this time I finally figured out a system!! So bring on the hand-me-downs because I can rock it now!!

First step: Sort into sizes. Don't worry about seasons, matching outfits, etc. at this point.


Second step: Sort into pants, shorts, long sleeve, short sleeve, dresses, etc. Then cascade layer them so that you can see exactly what colors and how many repeats you have. I allow 10 of each category and I get rid of any patterned bottoms. (This is key for me. Pattern bottoms are so hard to match with other things!!!)

Third step: Take your tops and place on top of cascade. This makes it really easy to see how many pants the shirt actually goes with. If it doesn't go with more than two or three, the top gets tossed.


Fourth step: Keep a tally of what you have in each size so that it is easy to pick up what you need at yard sales. Having plain bottoms also makes this easy because you can get really cute tops without having to worry about if you have pants to match.


Fifth step: put in bin and store away until needed.


I am so excited about this!! I have been working on it for such a long time and it finally clicked!! I'd like to know how you organize your clothes. Please tell me so that I can tweak if need be.

2 comments:

  1. This is hard for me too, especially rotating clothing as my kids grow, because it's not like BAM I can suddenly rotate them up to a new size all at once. I end up with a half-dozen totes that I need to have access to at any given time to pull clothes from and put clothes away in and that's a lot of precious accessible storage space!

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  2. Awesome - you have a system for everything! I am boring and basically dress the girls in either jeans or khakis all the time so that any shirt will match. I keep the next size up in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the smallest size they fit into in the top drawer and rotate them up and out as necessary.

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