Ivy says:
Since the weather is finally changing from hot to cold, now’s a good time to go through all your kids’ clothing and get rid of the stuff that doesn’t fit or just generally looks like crap. I use two methods to do this: at the source (drawers and closets) and during laundry time.
First, I go through the entire house and look under beds, dressers, and all the other places tiny little clothes like to hide. I have no idea why clothes like to hide so much under dressers, but they sure do in my house. I suspect my kids are trying something on, hating it, and then kicking the clothing item under the dresser. I’ve never been known to do that myself, no, never. 😉
I have 2 boxes in my laundry room. One is marked “consignment” and the other is marked “goodwill”, even though I have generally stopped giving to Goodwill and have started giving things away on Freecycle instead. Clothing that is too small, but looks practically new and is a good brand goes to the consignment store. Clothing that doesn’t look horrible, but doesn’t look practically new, or is an off-brand goes to Freecycle. Anything that looks horrible goes into my rag bag.
Once the laundry is finished (is laundry ever really finished? I don’t think so) I go into the closets and dressers and take a look. All the summer clothes are moved to either the top dresser drawer or the outskirts of the closet. I check the tags and take a look at each item. Clothing that is the smaller size my kids can still fit into goes either to the consignment or goodwill box. Larger size clothing stays.
Then I go through the winter clothing, making notes of what is needed, so I can go to the consignment store and buy more clothing for winter. Since my kids have such vast age differences, very little clothing is able to be passed between them, but anything that might stand the test of time is packed and placed into boxes in the attic with the size written on the box. Since I don’t have a lot of clothing that can be passed down, I generally use shoeboxes for this purpose.
Since I’m busy cleaning for all the guests that are coming, now is a good time to do this chore.
I follow the same system, but I’ve never taken the time to write about it. I’m going to link to your great write up!
In addition to consignment, I also list my clothes & kid stuff on craigslist.org. It’s a free listing, and there’s no percentage cut off the top of your sales! Whatever doesn’t sell on craigslist, I take to one of our local consignment sales.
I’ve found Freecycle to be a great resource for me because I’m home so often that if people want to come and pick it up, as opposed to me out in car dropping it off somewhere, that’s a real plus.