Children's Drawers - Works For Me Wednesday

It used to be really frustrating to me to try to get my girls' clothing into their drawers. They each have a 4 drawer chest - one drawer for undies, one for nighties, one for shirts and one for bottoms. Sounds pretty simple~ just fold them, stack them and put them in, right?

Well, even though I try to keep their clothing to reasonable numbers (despite my mom's tendencies for all things shopping for her only grandchildren), the stacking thing just didn't work, especially for the shirts and bottoms.

The girls couldn't see what was on the bottom of each stack and before you know it, the drawer would be a tumbled mess. I quickly got tired of re-folding it for the little ones or standing watch as the older ones re-did their mess.

One day it came to me that I could put the clothes in the drawer in a different way. I know - gasp - there is not a requirement to stack your clothes in the drawers from bottom to top!

Now, I put their shirts and bottoms ON END, in a long row. I can get 3 or more rows in each drawer (less as the sizes get bigger) and now the girls can see all their options at one glance.

Here are some photo examples:

This one is a shot of my 6 year old's shirt drawer - she can easily see her shirts and match colors with her pants in the drawer below:

Here is a shot of my 2 year old's shirt drawer - she can easily see her shirts and although she doesn't always match, she knows to look in the drawer below for her pants:

Here are the pants for my 2 year old - with the longer items in the middle kind-of as a divider:

As the girls get old enough to help with folding the laundry, I just show them how to fold their items to fit neatly in their drawers.

For shirts, they fold them in half from side to side first - (the sleeves meet), then they fold that in half (top to bottom). This creates the crease that is the side that goes up in the drawers as you see above.

For pants, they fold them from side to side, then over once from top to bottom and in half again.

Hopefully those explanations are as clear as mud - you can look at the pictures and see the mental images I'm trying to create here!

This is what Works For Me. You can find other great Works For Me Wednesday ideas over at Rocks In My Dryer! Have a great Wednesday!