I recently shared this post on Sweet Haute and will be sharing three other posts over on her site this year. I thought I would share it today over here so that you don’t miss out on some wonderful Spring tips on Closet Cleaning for Kids! I have been a busy bee working on cleaning out my kids walk-in closets for the last few weeks and I have some tips (and photos) to share with you on how to make the process a lot easier. I usually go through their clothes every Spring and Fall, but I love to do a DEEP cleaning of their closet in the Spring and I go through every nook and cranny.
Here are my tips on Spring Closet Cleaning for Kids:
1. Break the closet up into sections to clean. I didn’t have time to clean their entire walk-in closet in one setting, so I broke up the closet into 6 sections to clean as you’ll see in the photo below. I gave myself 1-2 hours per section to go through everything that needed to be organized, cleaned, tossed, etc. I worked on one section per day until the entire closet was done. Some of the categories in the below photo of my daughter’s closet include top shelf, bottom shelf, clothes on hangers, the floor, chest of drawers, etc.
2. Store sets of toys in baskets, chalkboard wooden tubs, storage bins, etc. In my daughters room, we were gifted a HUGE basket when we were married with jumbo sized towels. This basket is HUGE and it holds all of her stuffed animals… I like it so much that I am considering buying one for my sons room. Wooden chalkboard tubs are great in that you can put a lot of similar items into them and label the front, such as I did for the PlayDoh tub in my daughters room.
3. Keep, Toss, Donate or Sell. Is there a game missing pieces or an article of clothing that has stains on it? You will probably want to toss it. Is there some boutique or Gymboree clothes that you want to try to sell? Do you have a bunch of play clothes or beat up toys that you would like to donate? Divide all of these items up and bag them up into BLACK trash bags so that your kids will not see the contents inside and beg you to keep them. 🙂 Trust me, kids want to hold onto everything… and, you just can’t… unless you live in the Barbie mansion. 🙂
4. Think outside the box. My son went through a major lego-phase and he still loves to play with his lego sets that he has built. All of these lego sets were stacked on top of each other on top of his chest of drawers in a big haphazard mess. While I was trying to figure out what to do with them, an idea popped into this blogger’s mind! Nathan has a long mid-length shelf in his closet that spans one entire side of the closet. I decided to cut down some foam core boards in a grey color and lay them flat on the metal shelf. Then, we had enough room to set up ALL of his lego sets! It worked out wonderfully and it is the perfect height for him to play with them all! I love how it is like a mini-lego town and it is all set out for him to play with at any given time.
Above you’ll see a close-up of Nathan’s newest lego set from The Lego Movie. 🙂 Also, I bought a Mini Figures storage case at ToysRUs for both kids and it is wonderful for storing all of the extra little lego figures and robots (if they are into Star Wars legos!).
7. School Artwork, Special Papers and Art Supplies Storage. I keep a separate long and flat storage tub for all of my childrens artwork. I keep another storage bin with file folders labeled for each grade of school for important schoolwork papers, report cards, etc. I don’t keep all of their artwork, just the really special projects that they bring home. But, I do take a photo of each piece of artwork that they bring home and store it on an app on my phone called ArtKive, I then plan to make a book for Nathan and Autumn of their artwork for each grade in school.
The kids also have A LOT of art supplies, so I keep a tub for each of them where I keep rubber stamps, special coloring books, beads for making bracelets, colored pencils, etc.
8. Separate winter/fall clothes from summer/spring clothes and organize by color. If you don’t have enough space to store both seasons of clothes in your child’s closet, you can pack some of it up in storage bins and store elsewhere. I also hang all of my daughter’s dresses in the back portion of the closet, since they are a lot longer and take up more space.
9. Chest of Drawers are great for extra storage, especially if you can fit one in your child’s closet. I use their chest of drawers to store their pants, shorts, skirts, shoes, extra blankets for the bed, beach towels/summer stuff and usually the bottom drawer is a ‘junk’ drawer.
Above you will see a drawer full of Autumn’s skirts (yes, she has a drawer full!) and to the right of that is Nathan’s junk drawer.
10. Keep an empty shelf/basket. I just finished reading the Happiness Project, and in the book Rubin talks about a month of clearing and how she found it was nice to always have an empty shelf or drawer in the house. You can still have a junk drawer, but it is important to have an empty place in the house as well. I thought this was funny, because while organizing Autumn’s closet, I emptied a long narrow basket and I really didn’t have anything else to put in it. So, for fun… here is a photo documenting an empty basket in my house… Ok, it has two items in it, but it’s mostly empty! I am sure it will be full of junk again by next week this time. 😉
11. Store some of your belongings in their closets if you need to! I have an entire storage tub of my old dance recital costumes… Autumn LOVES playing dress up with all of my old costumes and so why not keep this tub in her closet… Right?!
Well, those are all of the Spring closet cleaning tips I have for today. Now I am working on cleaning my Master bedroom closet and let me tell you… I have way too many shoes! We also store our printer, kitchen gadgets and even old photos in our closet… I really need to clear out the closet and make it a closet for our clothes again… not for all of our excess clutter! Wish me luck on that one…
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