Organizing kids' clothes

In the past year, several people have handed down children's clothing to us. Each time, I pulled out a few things that would fit my children at the time, and packed the rest away into closets and spare dresser drawers.

Which meant that I would soon have a very hard time finding the clothes that fit my children next.

Today, the right time for organizing it all came about:  It had risen to the top of my Big Projects list; I had accumulated enough boxes; and someone just dropped off another bag of clothing. Also, it was just before laundry day, so I could put anything that needed washing into the laundry queue (and there were some things that needed it).  Things that come out of the laundry process, later this week, can be integrated into the clothing storage system I have created.

The first step was to pull out ALL of the clothes...boxes, bags, and (in some cases) entire dresser drawers. Everything was hauled to the living room and sorted by size and girls' versus boys'. I also made a pile for worn/unwanted clothing. As I wrote before, I am on a campaign to get rid of gray children's clothing in my house; this was a good time to carry that through.

I let the older children choose their wardrobes from the available clothing; what they don't want may be used later by a younger sibling.

Then I packed up the clothing that was to be stored, into boxes. I started with the largest sizes, which will be in storage the longest before being used, and worked downward, labeling each box front and back with the size.*  When I ran out of boxes, the rest fit into one large dresser drawer, that I had already been using for the purpose anyway.

I still have the Unwanted pile to sort through:  Give Away versus Re-Use/Recycle. Worn-out clothing gets stripped of buttons, zippers, and possibly elastic, and is then cut up into small rags to use in place of paper towels.

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I've adopted this practice of labeling both narrow ends of the box for all of our storage boxes, so that I can read the label no matter which side is facing forward.