Jumping off from yesterday's thought about the laundry, I have a question for those of you with more children than me or have fewer rooms to put your children.
We have three bedrooms. Marian has lived her whole life sleeping in my room. Her clothes occupy one of my dresser drawers. Although I have a box full of sweaters that haven't seen the light of day in 21 months and her clothes get crammed in there without much regard for organization, this is a decent arrangement. Soonish (months, years, who knows), she will be moving out of my room and then we will need to find a place for her to sleep and store her clothes.
The two bedrooms upstairs are rather narrow. The girls' room is longer than Sam's room, but they both have the same narrow width. In the girls room, we have a full bed with a twin bunk on top. There is room for one dresser. It is a pretty good sized dresser and the girls split it. Their closet has also been upgraded to very functional. The problem in their room is that we have room for another person to sleep, but no where to put her clothes.
In Sam's room, we have his twin bed and the big crib, which is currently a blanket container, and one dresser. Sam's closet has not been made functional and mostly contains boxes which were never unpacked from our move. In 2007. With this current arrangement, there is no room for another dresser. Theoretically we could replace the twin with twin bunks and get another dresser in there. The closet could be cleaned and made functional. Maybe. One fine day. But that is pretty much the limit.
Essentially we can arrange clothing space for our current number of children. I can imagine how to fit more sleeping space if we ever were to need it, but I would have no idea what to do about the clothing.
So my question is: Once you run out of dressers or places to put dressers, where do you put their clothes?
6 comments:
I use plastic storage containers from WalMart and stack them. Or just keep clean clothes in laundry hampers (sigh).
When I was a kid, my dresser drawers were always crammed and hard to open. So when we renovated our first house, we kept all the clothes in the closet. Turns out this looks great for resale, as it frees up floor space in the main rooms. As Jordana mentioned, we kept having kids and never adding dressers. I stacked open-mouthed bins in our laundry room for a "family closet". Each kid has one "column" of bins--school clothes, play clothes, night clothes, underwear/socks. Out of season clothes are in Ziploc big bags in their closets (which also have hanging dress clothes and church coats). I have a smaller laundry room, but it all fits, and it saves a ton of time moving clothes throughout the house. I think I paid less than $100 for all the bins at Kmart.
Meredith
I think the answer is less clothes but this is more "do as I say and not as I do" because I think I could pare down more. We have 7 kids in a three bedroom house. The baby, now 1, still resides in our room and has a small basket on the floor with his clothes in it (he doesn't have more than maybe 6 or 7 outfits).
The big girls, 16 and 14, have bunk beds in their 11x11 room and share one dresser and one closet. When I get sick of seeing clothes on the floor, I threaten to clean their room (which means picking everything off the floor and throwing it into a trash bag) but otherwise I let them manage where they put things.
The other four kids share another 11x11 room packed with two sets of twin bunks. They have a small walkin closet which contains one dresser with four drawers and another with two. They boy, 9, gets the dresser with two drawers and one side of the closet (we added bars so there are two bars on each side and just one up high across the back. The little girls, 3, 4, and 6 get the other side (I put nice clothes on top, play shirts on bottom and dresses and jackets across the back) the top drawer is for all of their underwear, socks, tights (it is a little chaotic but they know what their own looks like), then each subsequent drawer is for youngest to oldest for pants.
That is what we do but I like Meredith's idea but I don't have the space.
I think we do have too many clothes, but I'm terrible at paring down.
I hate crammed drawers and yet I have a number of them.
We have some of Marian's stuff in plastic storage containers under the mini-crib.
So do you think making the closest full o boxes extra functional could take the place of a dresser?
I use these bins for clothes. Just one unit would probably hold a typical 2 year old's clothes if you want to give it a trial run in your closet. I think the key is not having lids/drawers so it is simple to reach in.
http://www.kmart.com/united-solutions-3-pack-stack-bin/p-011W007110350001P?prdNo=1&blockNo=1&blockType=G1
We have plentyof closet space, and our kids' clothes are mostly hanging in the closet. If there aren't any drawers, there aren't any crammed drawers. There are plastic bons for underwear andsocks, and kids are permitted to live out of a laundry basket full of cleanlaundry aslong asit is hidden awayin the closet
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