Wondering how to organize all your baby clothes? Overwhelmed by piles and piles of baby clothes? Here’s a method for keeping everything sorted and knowing when to get rid of things.
Parents struggle with the absolute mess of baby clothes that invade your life when you bring a new baby home.
Here are 10 tips to help you organize your baby’s clothes, so you can find things quickly.
Organizing Baby Clothes Initially
Before you even bring your baby (or babies!) home, you’ll likely have a lot of clothes to sort through.
Here’s a step-by-step process to organize all those clothes and create a sustainable system.
1. Enlist A Friend
It can be super overwhelming to go through piles and piles of baby clothes on your own. I highly recommend enlisting a mom friend to help with this if you can.
If said friend is already a mom, that’s even better as she’ll bring some relevant experience to the job!
2 Make Piles of Clothes By Size
Start by organizing all of your baby clothes into piles. We made one pile for each size.
Because baby clothes sizing varies so much, I put each item in the pile of the age it started.
So, an item labeled “6m–12m” would go in the 6m pile, while “9m–12m” would go in the 9m pile.
This way I didn’t have clothes stored away that my daughter had already grown out of.
If an item of clothing looked substantially bigger or smaller than the other clothes in the pile, (or the label) I’d move it up or down a size.
This is where having another mom friend help you can come in handy. As a first-time mom I had no idea what looked true to size!
3. Make A Donation Pile
While you’re sorting through everything, make a donation pile of clothes that you know you won’t use or are the wrong season for your baby.
4. Store Clothes You Won’t Use Immediately
Once you have your clothes piles, use plastic bins or vacuum seal bags for each size, except for the size you expect your baby to wear when he or she is born.
5. Label Everything
Label each bin or bag with the size and store it for later.
Once my daughter started growing out of her existing clothes, I grabbed the next size bin down and swapped out the clothes.
This made organizing her dresser super easy, because I always had clothes that fit.
6. Use Drawer Dividers
Now you’ll start to store the clothes that baby will wear immediately.
Drawer dividers or storage boxes are really helpful for grouping things together or keeping things separated.
Since baby clothes are so tiny, keeping things in the divider boxes helped keep it tidy and organized.
7. Roll It Up
Folding baby clothes isn’t really necessary and can take up a lot of time.
Since baby clothes are so tiny, I recommend rolling clothes up and displaying in the dresser that way.
This way you can easily see everything and can choose baby’s clothes quickly.
8. Save Real Estate for Baby Essentials
Make sure to give things like diapers, burp cloths, socks, and miscellaneous baby items such as the NoseFrida, pacifiers, and nail clippers a dedicated drawer or space so you can easily access them as well.
9. Use the Closet
I also used the closet for hanging up larger items like dresses as well as seasonal clothes like jackets and winter baby gear.
If you have a small closet, use velvet hangers to maximize space in a small nursery. These take up so much less space than traditional plastic or wood hangers.
10. Use the Closet Door
If you have a door on your closet, you can use a shoe door hanger to store items like baby lotion, burp cloths, baby thermoter, etc. This saves space and makes it much easier to find things.
Organizing Baby Clothes through Growth Spurts
Babies grow frequently their first year so once you feel like you have clothes organized it will be time to move up a size! Don’t worry, this system will make it way easier.
Once I realize that we’re moving up a size, I have a purge day for the baby clothes. Here’s what that looks like:
- I take all the clothes out of the dresser and pull out everything in that size. There may be a few things that still fit, but it’s just easier at that point to move up a size completely so I can keep like sizes together, instead of adding a onesie here and there later.
- Once you have all of your too-small baby clothes together, move them to a storage bin or bag and label them for baby number two. Or, if you’re done having babies, pass them down to a mom friend or donate them to a local charity.
- Then grab your next-up size bin/bag and start fresh with a new bunch of baby clothes. I always enjoyed seeing the new outfits I had for dressing my little peanut.
- Keep one (at most two) outfits from each size if you want. I know baby clothes can be very sentimental. I’ve kept an outfit from each size that I especially loved. You will look back on these tiny clothes and wonder how they ever fit and where your baby went.
Good luck organizing your baby clothes. I hope this was helpful!
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I’m Nana to a TWO year old and soon-to-arrive second baby – also an Evie!
Your ideas are great! This system is just the ticket and I wish my daughter had read this. She was close but the purge happened over time, which meant lots of bins in the nursery, all the time.
One issue for her will be folding. Daddy is the laundry guy and he’s not a Konmari fan. Pants are easy to roll and see, but ideas on how to fold tops so the bins are effective? For Petra, those went onto hangers. In the end that’s harder to keep under control. Thanks! Renee
There is nothing more satisfying than organizing tiny clothes. I like those labels, too.