Organizing: Day 8 ~ Purging clothing

The one thing that has been the most difficult about blending a large family is laundry. There is always laundry to be done and we just have far too much! Three preteen/teen girls and of course me equals way too many clothes.

This has to change.

This week we decided to do a room swap. We moved the two youngest girls upstairs to share a room and moved our son downstairs. The big problem with this is the room downstairs is much larger, which was why we had the girls sharing it.

Now, my preteen girls have to share a smaller room with a smaller closet. Though it makes sense to have them upstairs for many reasons, the closet alone made the decision seem rather...well to say is simply: stupid!

We needed a new approach to the closet. After spending time with one of my closest friends, who lives in a house with NO clutter (and I really do mean no clutter), I decided to use some of her suggestions to make this work for me.

She never has more than one week of clothes for her boys but for preteen girls, that's a bit extreme. I thought about it for a while and assessed the space and decided on two weeks of clothes and two weeks of uniforms for school. That essentially equals about one load of laundry for uniforms and just over one load of laundry for other clothes.

Not a small job

Living in Colorado Springs, we have experienced seeing around 400 families that have lost everything to the Waldo Canyon Fire. I think it's a great time to go through what we have, purge and donating the unneeded items to the Fire Victims.

I sat down with kiddo #3 (deciding to take it one kid at a time) and talked through how we were going to do this. She brought all her clothes to the living room and then exclaimed, "I'm a little embarrassed at how much I have." Wow! That's a great way to start purging. I think the fire victims having nothing is in the back of all of our minds.

Huge pile 

This is what we did:

1. Folded all the clothing into like items piles
2. Made a list of the items
• Tank Tops
• Short Sleeve Shirts
• Long Sleeve Shirts
• Shorts
• Capris
• Pants
• Sweats
• PJs
• Leggings
• Hoodies
• Underwear
• Socks
• Dresses
3. Came up with a reasonable number for each item without looking at the piles, letting her know that no item could exceed 14 (she came up with the number not me...and was really reasonable)
4. Sorted through all the clothing and only kept the number of items on our list
5. Filled one laundry basket with the keep items

Donation Pile

Viola! I have a kiddo with only one basket of clothes to keep. She has some laundry to do and will have to purge from the those clothes too, but so far so good. One girl down...two more to go.

One basket of keep items

Side by side keep and donate

Hopefully someday, I'll win the laundry wars by getting what we own to a reasonable amount.