The Family Closet

It's another gray day so the pictures aren't great, but I wanted to get these posted since I have a few minutes. The family closet has changed my life people!! It has taken my most overwhelming chore from crazy to totally doable. We had to start in the laundry room because that is were most of this process starts. These storage racks went on sale for 69$ right after Christmas and we got 3. We also got several of the $3.50 Steralite clothes baskets because they fit side by side perfectly. In the laundry room I now have baskets labeled (Whites, Towels, Darks, Reds & Purples -we have a lot of those!) to separate clothes into, baskets marked "Clean" for clean clothes, a place for storage (extra dish cloths, table cloths, socks that need a mate). The laundry room is much less intimidating now, I actually like going in there!

I also now have room for my drying rack in here! I painted a huge henna design on the wall to pretty it up a bit. :) The Caffee sign is what I painted to go on my hospital door when I had Penny. 

We took Timothy's walk-in closet, which was mostly full of toys and junk, and made it the family closet. Since we are limited to such a small space with five kids worth of clothes I let the big kids (the three oldest) keep their play clothes in their drawers. Mama is in charge of ALL good clothes. I think this actually works in my favor too because they don't have any reason to be rummaging through this closet everyday. The two baby girls have all of their clothes in here. 

We started with big kids by letting the kids go through every stitch of clothing first, if they didn't like it or it didn't fit it went in the hannah home pile; if they liked it, it fit, and I liked it too we kept it. BUT we only kept 3 full folded baskets of clothes for each kid. That cut my laundry in HALF! Partly because I was washing a lot of CLEAN clothes that hadn't been worn, because there were just too many to fit in their drawers. In the closet we have two baskets for each big kid labeled "NAME Tops" and "NAME bottoms". The baby girls have 2 baskets too, but 1 is for good clothes and 1 is for PJ's and play clothes and they aren't even near full. 

Since the baby girls only have 3 sizes between them I left those in-between sizes in sep baskets in the closet too. Now when Penny moves up a size I'll just switch her basket out for the next size up, and rotate out the old one. I also gave the little girls small baskets for hats, socks, bloomers, and slips and tights.

The other extra baskets/ containers are labeled Swim, Winter (for hats, gloves, scarves), Kid clothes that don't fit (this will help when I run across 1 item that doesn't fit anymore, when the container is full I can go through it and  give away or keep for the next kid), Next Season (for summer clothes that should fit them again next summer), and Good Shoes (so that when I lay out their clothes I can also lay out the shoes that I like with it). 

It has been about a week since we started this system and it has been WONDERFUL! I can go in there and have everyone dressed and ready to go in minutes. I lay out each persons clothes and shoes and they filter in and get it. It also helps because the big kids know what to dress the babies in while I grab a quick shower. When we get home I tell them "Turn your shoes back in and your jeans if they aren't dirty" then they al go and put their clothes or shoes away and the dirty clothes get separated in the laundry room. So far it has been seamless! And mama is happy! And you know what they say "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!"