apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I never understood why people store their kids clothing in closets...all of those hangers seem costly. It seems much easier and cheaper to just fold them and store them in drawers. We keep ours folded and stored in drawers by clothing item type. Shirts, pants, socks, outerwear, etc. all in separate drawers. Now that our son is older we also use this organization system to get him to help put away his clothes.

In preparation for our little one's arrival I have been neatly folding all her clothes and puting them in a few "baby" dedicated drawers. A year's worth of clothes will fit in a 2 or three drawers. I wouldn't hang baby clothes, they would take up much more room that way- unless I had a closet system that could utilize the space under the 18" long baby outfits.

I had my toddler's clothes in drawers until she figured how to open her drawers and toss all her clothes all over her room. Now they are hung up and out of the way.

We did have a closet system, and have to say that there are some things you need to hang... dresses, skirts, blazers, special outerwear, little blouses or special shirts and vests.

Plus, you tend to use things you can see clearly; things folded in drawers tend to get forgotten.

*The* best organizer was getting these hangers: http://www.containerstore.com/shop/closet/hangers/childrens?productId=10006098

For the past 3 years we have had a system of baskets -- socks, undies, short-sleeved t-shirts, long-sleeved t-shirts, pants, pjs, sweaters -- all of these have their own basket, which sits on shelves in the closet (my kids' rooms are so small, there is no room for an additional set of drawers). Keeps everything tidy, and when you start to grow out of the basket, it is time to purge.

We just have a small dresser that doubled as a changer so all of the clothes didn't fit after we put sheets and bibs and burp cloths in there. So we hung a lot of them. Carters and Kohls give you the hangers with stuff so I think I've only had to buy one package of hangers and they were less than $5 so it's not really costly.

The clothing size organizers really help. I kept forgetting about things when he was tiny until he'd grown out of them because we got so many gifts.

i bought the dividers for my child's closet. they do come in handy. to the ones that say i don't know why people hang ... i had no choice. the room was small and so i could only fit one dresser (a changing table/dresser) and so all that was left was the closet. hanging isn't so bad as long as you have a system. i also agree with the ones that say things folded in drawers tend to be forgotten. i agree with that too. i didn't realize how much clothes we didn't use.

we're expecting our first in january and the closet in the nursery (of our rental home)has floor-to-ceiling shelves with no rod for hanging clothes, so we're making do with that. i like the idea of baskets or boxes with sizes/months labeled on them, that way what i'm using currently can go on the eye-level shelves and larger sizes can go up high where i can't easily reach.

I had a basket system that looked pretty and was very useful on just a shelf so we didn't have to buy a dresser for baby 1.
However now he is two years old and it is pretty useless. He gets them down and throws clothes everywhere.
I like hanging things I have bought for future use though so I can clearly see what I have already and then just need to get to fill in.

I do the boxes with sizes labeled on them for storage. That method comes in handy for that. Just in case I have another kid one day, it will be good to know I can grab the box with the NB-3 month clothes and then worry about the 3-6 month clothes a few months later.

this would be helpful for my hubby who didnt know what sizes were where in the closet. my son now 22 months wears a size 3 and 4 T. His older 5T are hanging also. this would also be helpful for baby sitters too.

I bought kid-sized hangers at Walmart 10/$1. They are pretty sturdy. I had my son's closet arranged much like the photo you show, but then noticed that things tended to not always get hung up in the right section of the rod after laundry was done.
I solved that by saving the little flat plastic closures that come on bread bags. You know, the ones that say the date the bread was made or expires or whatever? I used a sharpie to print the size on it then attached it to the neck of the hanger. That way you can easily see the size without checking the tag. They also come in different colors, so I color-coded them and now an item hung in the wrong section stands out easily.

I had one big box for all the clothes that were the wrong size. I kept it under the crib. When I noticed he was starting to outgrow his current clothes, I would just go through the box and pull out all the clothes that would now fit.