How We Store Our Kids’ Clothing

A few weeks ago, I shared why I don’t buy kids’ clothing in advance, why we purge outgrown clothing immediately, and why I don’t rotate clothing out by season. 

As a follow-up on that post, I thought it might be helpful to share how we store the kids clothing we DO keep — everything that actually fits and that they wear right now! 

It’s sort of a hodge-podge system with various items of clothing stored throughout our house — but it makes sense for our family and for our kids at this stage of life (and you know I’m all about functional storage, even if it’s a little strange!) 

THE CLOSET: 

The closet in the kids’ bedroom is where we store the vast majority of their clothing. It was originally “Nora’s Closet” when we renovated the room for her a few years ago. However, since the kids insist on sharing the same bedroom, we said they had to share the closet too. 

Nora wasn’t thrilled about it initially (she used the closet for storing all sorts of craft projects and other “non-clothes things”) but I feel like we’ve made plenty of space for her extra things as well as the boys’ clothing! 

In fact, we still have tons of empty space in this closet right now (mainly because no one can reach up to the higher shelves yet!)

Take a look!

Nora’s hanging clothes are to the left inside the closet. She uses the pink bins to store shorts, capris, and pants; and she keeps socks, fashion scarves, and other smaller accessories in the white plastic drawers.

She can use the shelves to display various crafts or art projects, and the shoe organizer on the wall is for all her Shopkins, Ponies, LOLs, and other trinkets and treasures she gets as gifts or from birthday parties. 

The boys’ hanging clothes are in the center of the closet. Their everyday clothes are on the lower rod so they can get dressed on their own; their nicer clothing is on an upper rod to the right side of the closet (which we get down for them on days when they can be a little more dressed up!)

The boys’ pants and shorts are in the dresser (more on this below).

They keep their treasures in wooden boxes on the bottom shelf… and we store our massive bins of LEGO’s on the floor. 

We recently had a huge hand-me-down gift of LEGO Duplos, and after realizing how much of a “mess” LEGOs can make, we decided to move all LEGO stuff out of the play bedroom and into the “sleeping bedroom” (as the kids call it!) 

This way, the LEGOs can stay out on the floor while the kids are in the middle of playing, but they still have plenty of floor space to play something else in the other room. We eventually pick up both bedrooms before lunch and again before bed time, and (as you can see from the pictures above) we store both of our big LEGO bins in the clothes closet for now. 

I’m certain we will need to re-evaluate this system moving forward, but it works for now… and that’s all I really care about!

Oh, and if you’re wondering why we aren’t using the 2nd closet in this bedroom for kid’s clothing (good question!) — it’s because we use it for all our dress-up clothes (obviously!)

This will be another system we re-evaluate in the future, but for now, it works REALLY well for our family as our kids use dress-up clothes every single day! 

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THE DRESSER: 

Nora doesn’t like to fold her clothes, so (as mentioned above) she keeps her pants, capris, and shorts in fabric bins inside the closet.

However, the boys can’t reach up to the shelves to get fabric bins down, so we still store their pants, shorts, and socks in the bottom 2 drawers of the dresser in their room. 

The top drawer is empty, and the 2nd drawer has a few items of clothing that are too small for Simon but will most likely work for James within the coming year. 

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THE MUDROOM: 

We store all our footwear, winter gear, swimming suits, hats, sunglasses, umbrellas, backpacks, and bags in the mudroom. 

It is FANTASTIC to have a place for all these things right when we walk in the door — and it’s nice that we don’t need to make space for these items in our bedrooms. 

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THE BATHROOM: 

As odd as it might sound, the kids keep their PJ’s and underwear in their bathroom as they change into these items every night after their shower/bath. 

This system works really well and they simply put the PJ’s back into the drawer (or into the hamper that is also in the bathroom) after they get dressed in the morning.

Nora currently takes a shower in our bathroom, so we have a drawer for her PJ’s and undies down there. 

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I can’t tell you how many times we have tweaked, altered, or totally overhauled the way we store our children’s clothing, toys, and other treasures throughout the past 7 years… so I’m sure this current storage method will not last forever. 

I will continue to adapt our storage solutions as our storage needs change, as the kids get older, etc. 

For now, it is VERY doable to have all 3 kids store their clothes in one closet… we’ll see if we add Clara’s clothes into the mix in another year or so!