Getting organized

The other day I read this post by my friend Alysun. It made me think about my #3's problem with clothes. He can't put them away, his sister (who's in charge of that chore each morning) couldn't put them away, even I had a difficult time getting all his clothes to fit into their drawers. The result?

Drawers overflowing and a tub that is supposed to hold Playmobile figures being used as a clothes dump. And much of those clothes would end up in the dirty baskets in the laundry room since they were just laying about...know how much I loathe washing clean clothes...

So I took a deep breath and went in to do something about it the other morning. Really it didn't take too long. I sorted through all his clothes and even though he hadn't grown out of much of it I put them away for the next 4/5 size wearer. I also got a small pile of just plain done clothes and tossed those.

Isn't it lovely???

And it got me thinking. This little bit of time invested. I got such great results but I also got a basket full of clothes that needed further storage.

I do have a system for all the hand-me-downs. But I haven't been using my system in the past few months. Really it's just been a dump it out there in a basket or bag or something and do it later plan. Not working real well and I was beginning to have difficultly walking around in the area of the garage this system takes place.

So I gathered all the tubs, baskets, bags and piles I could.

Checked sizes and dumped into the right tub. I had to add two more tubs but I got everything in.

Another item off the list. Once they were all stacked up, in a weird order too since I'll need 2T next and my cousin wants to go through the 0-3m one before I'll be doing anything with the 6-7, I could walk in the back room of the garage so nicely...it was like having another room added on.

Thought I'd show off my wonderful packing/moving/storage organization while we're here.

I read about this idea in the Duggar's book 20 and Counting. Basically as I packed over a year and a half ago for our move to Eugene each box got an inventoried card of what was in that box. Each card and box got a matching number. The cards are kept in a recipe box type holder. When we moved in to our house we didn't unpack all of the boxes. Some are stored in a loft like attic in the garage. Some are in the back storage room of the garage. Some were in my sewing room. Each box that was unpacked, that card got pulled and tossed. Each box that got stored, the card was marked where the box was located. If I took just a couple of things from the box, I made the corrections on the card and everything got put away. I have to tell you that though labor intensive on the front end, this is an invaluable system for me. If I'm looking for something; tax papers, a toy that someone realizes never got unpacked, a pair of shoes or a dress (I was pregnant when we moved so had all of my regular clothes in boxes) I can just look through the cards, find which number box the item is in, and Mr. Wiedz can find that box (we took care to store the boxes with the numbers showing). And I can add to it. As I add clothes storage tubs, I just fill out a new card, mark the box, and put everything away!

I'm linking up to raising arrow's homemaking link-up this week. Go check out some other great homemaking tips.