works-for-me: Family Closet

Laundry.

I hate it.

Or, more accurately, I hate putting it away. So, all to often, I don't (or didn't). But with 6 (soon to be 7) members in the family, it wouldn't take long for everything to be a HUGE mess. :( Something had to give.

So, of course I stole an idea. We nabbed the idea of a family closet from Jillienne (see her's here). This solved a couple of fairly big problems for us. One is that hauling loads and loads of laundry from the basement laundry room upstairs to the bedrooms (and then actually putting it away!) was just awful. Now, I can pull it out of the dryer and immediately sort it right on top of each kids' dresser. Usually it gets put away (but, I'll admit, not every time!). Much easier and faster!

The other major benefit is that our house isn't all that big for 4 kids and will soon be getting smaller. Taking the dressers out of their bedrooms opened up a lot of space and made everyone's life easier. The kids needed new dressers anyways (they were sharing and needed room!) so we grabbed these great, economical ones from Ikea and it's been a good fit (literally and figuratively).

You might think running down to the basement for clothes would be a huge pain. And sometimes it is. But what we *try* to do, is pick out a weeks' worth of clothes on Sunday - these are full outfits, including undies and socks that we organize together, by kid, by outfit. Each kid has a hanging closet organizer in his/her closet (like this one, but white) and we just put in their outfits weekly. It makes school mornings much easier! Now that summer has started, I've been a bit more lax on the planning...

(please ignore the clothes sticking out of the drawers! We are between seasons and running out of room!)

In a perfect world, I would have a bit more space to have a nice big table for folding and racks to hang up their nicer clothes. But I make do with folding on Ally's dresser (her's is the long wood colored one that doesn't match) and their nicer clothes are still hung up in their closets in their rooms. So not too big of a deal.

Whoo hoo! Works for me!