Do-it-yourself baby clothes organization

We have generous family and friends who have given us lots of used and new baby clothes. What to do with them all?

After getting some advice from a friend, I sorted out the clothing by age:

• Newborn
• 0-6 months
• 6-9 months
• 9-12 months
• 12-18 months
• 18-24 months

We have a lot of newborn to 6-9 month clothing. I boxed up the other clothes by age in banker’s boxes and labeled them.

Then, I separated the remaining clothing by type within each age group:

• Short-sleeve onesies
• Long-sleeve onesies
• Socks, “shoes,” caps, hats
• Footie pajamas
• Sleep gowns/sacks
• Outer clothing/outfits (shirts, pants, overalls)
• Outerwear

The outerwear and outer clothing/outfits got hung on individual hangers and put in the closet. In the photo below, you can also see the banker boxes that store the bigger clothing:

I also cut out tags from manila folders (a rectangle with a slit and circle cut in it for the closet rod) to separate the clothing by age:

For the other clothing (onesies, pajamas, etc.), I organized them in dresser drawers by making my own drawer dividers out of used wrapping paper (from the baby shower) and pieces of cardboard cut to size:

There is one long piece of paper that fits horizontally, folded to fit pieces of cardboard (that run vertically in the picture). Then I covered individual pieces of cardboard for the horizontal pieces and taped them in.

In this specific drawer, the left two “cells” hold newborn onesies (short sleeves on the bottom, long sleeves on top), the middle cells hold 0-6 month onesies, and the right column is for socks, hats, etc.

I used the sticky part of a post-it note to make easy-to-remove drawer labels:

Post-its also worked nicely to label the subdividers:

This way, when Steve folds the laundry (or if we have friends who come and help us), he’ll know where things go!

The best part? The cardboard was from an Ikea furniture box that was going to be recycled anyway. The gift wrap was from my baby shower and also would have been recycled. The manila folder that I cut up had already been reused with multiple labels and was nearing the end of its useful life. So the only waste that I generated were the non-sticky parts of post-it notes. No need to go out and buy fancy drawer organizers when you can make stuff yourself for free!

• Organizing