Winterize Within, Part One: Children’s Clothes

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik

‘Tis the season for articles and instructions on how to winterize your home to prepare for the coming months of winter.  As parents with children at home, this is also the perfect time of year to winterize the inside of our homes, particularly when it comes to sorting through the “stuff” that goes along with having children.

This week at Simple Kids, we are going to focus a few minutes each day on winterizing the interiors of our home to make way for the months ahead. Let’s be inspired by the turning colors of the leaves falling from the trees which remind us that there is a season for all things.  It’s time to collect and make decisions on the things of last season as we make a place for the things of the season to come.

This will be our Winterizing Within schedule:

• Monday – children’s clothes
• Tuesday – toys
• Wednesday – games, media equipment, miscellaneous play items
• Thursday – books
• Friday – photographs
• Saturday – reflection time

We’ll use 3 Ps to guide our winterizing efforts:

• Pause – find a place to push “pause” on your normal daily schedule and find a place to work on winterizing.  I would suggest aiming for thirty minutes to an hour of your time each day.
• Purge – collect the items to be worked on that day and do a quick purge, identifying what is broken, stained, outgrown, worn out, and in general needs to have a decision made upon.
• Push – find a way to push forward with forward momentum to follow through on the decisions you made for the items you have purged.  Bags of clothes to be donated?  Push them out the door to your vehicle and to a drop-off point?  Sacks of broken or unsellable/unworthy of donation toys?  Push them out the door to the garbage.  Unprinted photographs?  Push yourself to organize what you want printed and make a plan for following through having them printed.

Today’s category is children’s clothing:

1) Make time in your schedule (pause) to collect last season’s clothes for each of your children.

2) Purge clothes and create piles – to donate, to sell, to hang onto for hand-me-downs, and to repurpose.

3) Before the end of the day, push forward with the piles.  Donated clothes should be taken to donation points or make a place in your schedule this week to take care of this.  Hand-me-downs can be boxed and labeled.  Stained, ripped, or threadbare clothing can be taken to a crafting area for repurposing.  If you are going to sell outgrown clothes, make some space in your schedule to take pictures and post descriptions of the clothing.  Follow through on pushing these outgrown clothes out of your house and you’ll see a financial payoff when you have!

I’m setting my timer right now to start purging last season’s clothes for each my girls. I’m looking forward to a home that is prepared within for winter this year! I look forward to hearing your winterizing success stories today.

Tagged as: children's clothing, organzing, purging, winterizing