Weekly Spring Cleaning Project

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This week I will be taking on my master bedroom clothes closet organization. My closet is the dumping grounds for things, especially when it gets busy. It is where I keep all the totes and varying sizes of bags that we use to take things here and there, and since we are in our busiest seasons in life we are always needing a bag of one size or another.

Not only do I have bags all over my closet right now, I have a mixture of some winter clothes and some summer clothes all over the place since I haven’t taken the time to do anything with switching the seasons out in my clothes, only grabbed a few shirts and shorts to get me through until I could actually get to the switching around process.

Yep. It’s a disgrace, but I have nothing to hide from you. This mess is just a reflection of a busy family, I suppose. I do look so forward to getting it done this week.

What project are you taking on this week?

 

Last week’s primary spring cleaning project was among the projects I dread doing most, and it feels so good to have it behind me.

Living in Michigan means that we experience all four seasons, and our clothes need to reflect that. Rotating kids’ clothes each spring and fall is such a huge undertaking with seven kids to deal with.

Generally, I just spend the entire weekend doing it, but this time I decided to work on it as I could throughout the week. This meant that I had bins and piles of clothes around. I thought this would drive me a little crazy, and although it did bother me, it was not nearly as much as I thought. I found that living in the turmoil actually made it quicker and therefore less time consuming on the weekend, which worked out great since the weekend was so busy for us.

If you have clothes to rotate around, like me, this is the method I have found to work well over the years.

• My first step is to get the current season of clothes out of the drawers and closets, except for a couple of things for those unseasonable days.
• Once the clothes are all out, I separate what should fit next season and what shouldn’t. The things that should fit come the following season are stored on the top of their closet while what won’t fit gets put in more permanent storage. Having it already sorted for the next season makes the task I hate a bit less overwhelming since theoretically everything I pull down from the closet fits and is all ready to put away into drawers.
• Generally, I do this purging of the current season for either all the boys or all the girls first since because I have seven kids, separating the project down by sex means the process goes more smoothly. All my bins of clothes are separated into boys and girls in the storage area, so instead of hauling out all 42 bins of clothes at once I am only hauling out half.

42 bins you ask?! Yes 42 bins. Winter coats and snow pants, boots, baby blankets and toys, and then all the clothes really adds up with as many kids as I have.

• As I take clothes out of the bins for the new season, the old clothes that won’t fit in the upcoming season get put into the bins with a bit of rearranging to keep everything sorted by size and season. I generally have a bin of each size per season. For example, I have a bin of 2T summer and a bin of 2T winter. Even if the bins are not packed as efficiently as they could be with empty space, I find the organizational benefits to far outweigh being able to lessen a few of the tubs by combining sizes or seasons.

These are a couple pictures of the process as well as the storage area I have to work with. Not a lot of space by any means, but I am so thankful to have it. It is the dead space on the side of our over the garage room. I have actually gotten stuck out there when I was nine months pregnant. I learned to send my kids out there in that case!

If you have been following along at taking on your own spring cleaning projects, how did you do this week?