Family Closet

After struggling and struggling with laundry issues for years, I finally decided to make a family closet! I first saw the concept of a family closet from watching the TLC shows about the awesome Duggar family. I don't have a whole room I can dedicate to it, but I did figure out that it could fit nicely in our family room, located very conveniently next to the laundry! Our family closet consists of 2 dressers, a few bins and crates, and a hanging rack with bags underneath. I keep the five oldest kid's clothes in the family closet. Mine, Dave's and Duncan's are in our master bedroom (like normal people...) and Brighton's clothes are still kept in his room.

Everything is labeled. Each of the three girls have three drawers: one with undies, socks, swimsuits, jammies and undershirts, one with long and short-sleeved shirts, and one with pants and shorts. The boys each have a drawer with their undies and swimwear. Then I ran out of drawers. :) So the boys have two stacking bins, the bottom one with their socks (they wear the same size) and the top with their jammies (again, they basically wear the same jammies.) The sock bin is our cat, Owl's, favorite new napping place. :) I keep the boy's shirts in the two crates turned on their side: one stack of short-sleeved and one stack of long-sleeved.

All the kid's church clothes are hung on the hanging rack. Girl's skirts are kept folded on top. The hanging bags below come in very handy! One bag is for items that need to be mended and/or dyed, one bag is stuff that needs to be donated and the last bag is stuff that has been grown out of and needs to be sorted into the correct storage bin to await the next kid to grow into it!

I LOVE this new system!!! It has made laundry a joy to me! For years, I have gone from one method to another, mostly consisting of each person in the family having their own clean clothes basket....with the goal of putting their clean clothes away at least once a week. In reality, all 9 or 10 clean clothes baskets (gotta have a sock basket!) were lined up in my room where kids rifled through them each day to find clean clothes (and left their jammies strewn about) and each night to find jammies (and left their dirty clothes mixed in with the clean!) I only got around to putting clothes away every month or two. Our master bedroom always felt and looked like a disorganized laundry room. Now, my kids clothes are all put away for the first time in a looong time, and, better yet, I know that they will always be put away! No more clean clothes baskets (except for Dave and I, but putting away our clothes will be much easier now!) means that the kids clothes get put away as soon as they are washed and dried!! :) I hope in our next house, we will have a laundry room big enough to house our family closet...or even a small room close to it to devote to the cause!

Want to see our dirty laundry? Check out this post to find out how we manage it! :)

Need some more laundry room/laundry keeping ideas? check out this link and all the links here to see how other families do it!