As a new Mom, you will have too many clothes for your baby/babies! New, gently used, splurges and consignment or hand-me-down, I have learned the hard way that you NEED to 'manage' your babies' wardrobes!!! Month after month, day after day I unearth outfits that the girls never wore, but that are now too small for them, or are too wintery, or whatever! And it's upsetting that I didn't have a chance to put these cute and lovely little pieces on the girls!
So. Here's what I have to offer, that I did wrong on the first go-around.
1. I decided to fold and place a LOT of clothes into the dresser drawers I had, sometimes placing up to 5 outfits, tops, bottoms or whatever on top of each other inside each drawer, eventually stuffing each drawer with clothes. For obvious reasons, the clothes at the bottom were usually forgotten.
2. I decided to fold and place clothes of varying ages into the drawers, with (what seemed a good idea at the time) the littlest clothes in the top drawers, the 3 month clothes in the middle ones and 9-12 month clothes in the bottom. Again...too stuffed, and why have clothes in drawers that don't fit the girls? Pack those away, and spread out only the clothes that fit them NOW. If you see them, they will end up wearing them!
3. Here's a GREAT tip. In my quest to organize this little house for the arrival of the twins, I did a LOT of packing up of anything that we didn't immediately or often need. Bin after bin got packed. Bin after bin got loaded into a newly-created mezzanine in the garage (fancy word for overhead storage area). Ultimately? I have no bins left to pack up clothes that don't fit the girls anymore! So what's the tip, that I got from a girlfriend of mine who has way too many baby clothes to deal with herself? Take your diaper boxes (or other small boxes, but these make the most sense) and pack up the overflow clothes into them, labeling them by the age of the clothes inside them. That way it's easy to ID the baby clothes boxes, and when you have friends looking for clothes, you can pull them out and take them over, and when you are ready to consign, they are also ready to go.
Oh, and just as an aside, have you seen the closet we created in the nursery for the girls? If not, take a look:
We took off our closet doors (those crappy cheap slidy things) and made some custom curtains. Bought the rods at Home Depot, and the shelving solution at IKEA. We connected the shelves to each other and then the wall, and used three small rods for clothes hanging, with the idea that when the girls grow, you can remove the middle rod to hang the bigger clothes. I will be sad to leave all this behind, but the new house already has custom inserts and so this stays with the house. But. It's been a great and practical organizational solution!
What do you do to stay organized? What are you doing with the superfluous little pieces of clothing? And where do you consign with the best payout and purchasing history?
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