How we organize and store kids clothes when we have a lot (of kids)

We have a lot of kids.  Kids need clothes.  We have, need, or are cycling through our fair share of clothing right now.

I've developed a few systems to make this process easier for me.

Giant caveat - I am new-ish in this parenting thing and I'm not sure how much this process will scale when kids have more decision making on their own wardrobes

1. Space Budget.  This is invaluable to me.  "Where do I put these clothes" can be answered in so many ways.  "How much space do I want to give to storing and managing clothes?" is a way easier place to start.

2. Always Be Purging.  Get rid of stuff that doesn't fit kids, that is stained/ripped, that they wont wear.  Move clothes out of drawers when clothing is not being actively used.  

3. Try to have as few clothes as possible without making your or your kids lives harder.  We are lucky here because schools have uniforms.  I LOVE school uniform! For many weeks of the year, my kids wear the same uniform monday to friday.  I only need weekend kids clothes and school holiday clothes.  

4. Try to have all your babies in the same season.  Obviously this is not really good sorting advice and can't be followed in any way.  I've noticed Isaac and the twins are able to wear a lot more of the same things because they were two weeks (and 5 years) apart.  Lilah was only two months (and two years) apart from Isaac but two months in baby clothes is a lot of months.

5. Did I mention getting rid of clothes?  Have a "I love this" bag and then everything else goes goes goes! If you want to sell things then have a "sell" space, but make sure you're happy with the amount of space you're using to sell baby clothes, or hold on to potentially sellable baby clothes.  Also, baby clothes are super cheap second hand, so I tend to go with "sell" as much as possible and assume I can buy something pretty cheap if I need it later.

Anyways, here's our current fancy storage system:

The top box is 12-18, next month size for the babies.  Then I have 4-5 Summer and Winter, which is sort of what Lilah is in now, but also sort of what she's growing out of now.  When she grows out of something it goes straight into the 4-5 box.  

When I need something for Lilah I check the 5-6 box 

6-7 is what Isaac is in now, and also what he will be in soon. I also consider them as follows

Babies Future

Lilah Past

Lilah Current

Lilah Future/Isaac Past

Isaac current/Future

I am probably shuffling clothes out of their drawers at least every two weeks.

Isaac and Lilah each have one small sets of drawers in their room:

Drawers are organized as follows.

Lilah Top Drawer (L-R) Trousers, Shirts, Dresses & tights

Lilah Middle - School Uniform

Lilah Bottom - Pyjamas, Underpants, Jumpers

Isaac top (L-R): short sleeve shirts & button downs, long sleeve shirts, trousers

Isaac bottom: Pyjamas, underpants, jumpers

Not Pictured: Kids also have coats downstairs, Shoes downstairs, and a Kallax drawer with Socks, Hats, Gloves, Scarves etc. 

British houses don't always have closets and I think that's insane.  This is our general organization and it keeps me from drowning under a mountain of clothes... for now.

Lets take a tour of small kitchen appliances & a food processor conundrum

Let's take a tour of my kitchen appliances!

First, we have a small kitchen.  In fact, it's 10'11 by 8'11 (or 3.3m x 2.7m).  The kitchen also has three doors into it (unlike the drawing below, which for some reason omits the door from the kitchen to the dining room):

It is awkwardly small and we try and fit a lot into this space, and but all appliances need to be somewhere.  With that in mind - here is our appliance tour:

Kettle: No British house is complete without an electric kettle.  This must be our most used appliance.  We don't have a coffee maker so it's always my first stop for my morning coffee (I use a drip filter/V60).  Then my second coffee, and endless cups of tea.  We also use it to boil water before cooking as it heats up much faster than the stove.  

Toaster.  Everyone needs a toaster right?  This is a two slice toaster.  It is... fine.  It was on sale and definitely not worth kitchen-aid prices.  We could probably use a four slice toaster someday but we don't have the space right now.

Microwave.  We didn't have a microwave for about a year in our 20s.  I'm not sure why.  It was silly.  Microwaves are the best.

Bread-maker.  We use this A LOT.   We bought this bread maker second hand right before Isaac was born (in 2018).  The person selling it had labeled the plug, which Andy and I really appreciate.  I was worried we wouldn't use it at all, but we actually use it about 2-3 times a week.  We also have a back stock of about 15kg of flour, for making bread.   The white tub below is about 30% of our flour backstock.

Slow Cooker.  We use this pretty frequently too.  Andy wanted a big one, which is good for making lots of food, but I miss my smaller slow cooker.  In my dream kitchen I would have a small slow cooker and a big slow cooker for different sizes of food prep.  I get the feeling that we will need the big one more often with our giant brood.  Last week I cooked a whole chicken and carrots in the slow cooker.

(left to right)

Waffle Iron.  Recent addition because I love waffles.  I didn't want to spend a lot on something I wasn't sure if we would use, but this one is somewhat plastic-y feeling.  I can see the benefit of removable plates now for easy washing.

Hand Mixer.  I had a very cheap "stand mixer" for ages, which I spent £40 on in 2012.  That was a lot of money for me in 2012!  It could be used as a hand mixer or it could be attached to a bowl that would rotate.  It didn't do either thing very well and it took up a lot of space.  Eventually we sold it (for £20?) and I bought a nice hand mixer that was more expensive I am very happy with the purchase.  Someday I would like a kitchen aid mixer.  First I need a bigger house.  The £300,000 for a bigger house at least makes the £400 kitchen aid seem more reasonable though?

Blender.  We LOVE smoothies in the summer and I bought this blender a few years ago.  I only use it for smoothies so we only use it half the year.  I feel like I did a lot of research on blenders before we bought this and it's not quite as great as the £44 price tag should have indicated.  I like it because it does blend - but I feel it needs lots of liquid and it is very LOUD.

Immersion Blender.  In the winter we often use the stick blender to make soups. Right now I mostly use the food processor attachment to make hummus.  I use it A LOT and it's starting to fall apart. Every time I use it I think it's probably the last time... Its starting to make a grinding noise and even Andy has noted that it's going to completely fall apart (Andy is usually a use it and repair it guy).  The stick/blender piece is great, but the mini food processor attachment probably wasn't meant to be used as often as we do.  I also try and use it for making falafel and fritters, which requires multiple transfers to a bowl since the processor is so small.

(also once I broke the hand mixer by following a Ottolenghi recipe for hummus which burned out the motor.  I thought it would be strong enough to work through the chickpeas but the chickpeas won.)

This brings me to the problem at hand... I "need" a new food processor.  I am not keen on buying a standalone food processor because I feel we already have too many appliances in our storage spaces.  Also what size do I need?  The current attachment is mini but sometimes I wish it was less mini.  I'm wondering whether a combined food processor and blender is a better option? Or can I use a blender to make hummus?  Can I use a blender to make salsa?  

Our house has no storage so Andy and I bought this unit in 2019.  Andy actually drew it and measured it and a company in Bath built it for us.  We recently realised we may have fit it upside down.  Also, it took 4 of us to mount it to the wall.  We had two friends come over to lift it.  I am not keen on glass cupboards but if we kept it a bit more organised then it would probably look better.  A project for another day.

Also, counters are not storage.  That is a project for tomorrow.

What is your favourite appliance?  Should I get a new food processor?  Should I get a combined food processor and blender?  Should I make do without a food processor?  Do you use a food processor and what do you use it for?

Kitchen Projects - Before and Before

We are finally getting a dishwasher.

I have wanted a dishwasher for years. My first plan was to move the washing machine "somewhere else" and put a dishwasher there.  The options for "somewhere else" and associated costs were as follows:

Build an extension (£50,000+)
Remodel upstairs bathroom (£10,000+)
Put in current bathroom (£500, but need dodgy builder because this is technically illegal)
Convert downstairs bathroom to utility room (£3,000+ and loss of bathroom)

Unfortunately, the good ideas were not financially viable, and the financially viable ideas were not good.

I realized that if we remove a counter and two cupboards from our kitchen we can fit a full fridge-freezer (right now we have a under counter versions of both).  This option should be less than £500 (quote coming on Monday) and means we get a full fridge freezer (no more bending over!) and a dishwasher.

So, we need to say goodbye to this messy corner:

More importantly, we need to empty out the two cabinets.  This is not as easy as it sounds - we have a very small kitchen with many many things in it.  On Saturday I started the emptying process:

The left cabinet has baking supplies.  I decided to be a decanter and put as much as possible into Jars which we can put on our over door shelves.  It's gone OK:

I know labeling jars is silly, but I also know paper taped onto the side is not my favourite look:

I have no plan of action for the right hand cabinet - tea/coffee supplies and random spices and cooking seasonings:

And I also think far more kitchen real estate has gone to tupperware than I would like:

So, it's a work in progress. But I am getting somewhere!  One of the big considerations now is "how much of x do we really need in our kitchen?" During Covid we started ordering things in bulk because going to the store was awful.  At one point we had over 100 pounds of flour in our house.  Every time I would go to Lidl I would stock up on everything.  But now I'm more aware that space is the limiting factor for our kitchen, so perhaps we are better served by keeping less stock and re-buying more frequently

It's weird how quickly the "stock-up" mindset came in, and how tricky I'm finding it to change!

Do you like your kitchen?  Do you have enough storage?  Are you a stocker-uper or a buy-as-needer*?

*I know Gretchen Ruben calls this Underbuyer and Overbuyer, but who is to say what the right level of buyer is?  If there's an under-buyer shouldn't there be a "buyer" who does the right amount?  I think these are different forms of shopping, not "under" or "over" shopping.

How we organize everything: the F.L.O.M. (Family Logistics and Operational Meeting)

I wish I could ask every person how they organize their lives.  I am so curious – how does it work? What do you do?  If you are in a partnership, what does your partner do?  Every single person lives a life every day of the same number of hours and yet has a vastly different experience of those hours.  When it comes to families there are fundamentals we all need to follow: we all get food ready, we all maintain a home to a liveable standard, we all clothe ourselves and our kids.  We think about school and leisure.  Every family has 70% of the same things on our plates and we spend almost no time talking about how we manage it all.

A year ago my husband and I started having planning meetings.  They’ve evolved over the month and will surely continue to evolve.  Our current agenda is as follows:

• Short review of the week – specifically kids and food plan.  Did the week go well?  Was it hard?  Why?  Can we improve things going forward?  Lots of weeks repeat – I’m in para-finance so my months consist of regular 4-5 week intervals of busy to less busy.  If a busy week went bad, what can we do to make it better next time?
• Look ahead to the following week
• Food plan: go through each day and decide who will make dinner and what we are having
• Nursery run: who is doing drop off and pick up at nursery? Usually whoever does drop off makes dinner.
•  Nursery Cover: Who answers the phone if nursery calls to send a kids home, and who can take time off work to watch any sick kids that week
• Sport/Hobbies: do each of us have enough time for our scheduled sport/hobby in the calendar?
• Family Adventure: do we have at least 1 family adventure planned in the week, or enough family time in general?
  
• Shops and Driving: Do we need to go food shopping?  Anything else we need to drive to?
• Any Other Business: We have a FLOM notebook where we write AOB items in the back, things we need to discuss that we don’t get time during the regular week.  Often this includes holiday planning, potential trips, division of labor (a few weeks ago my AOB was “I don’t want to do all the laundry anymore).  Sometimes we have AOB items that stay there so long we have to schedule a new time to address them, like “pick out cabinet unit for dining room” which has been on the list 6 months and we finally scheduled a time to do it together because no one had the energy for that on a Friday)

We have additional items during our End of Month and Mid Month meetings as follows:

Mid Month:

• Looking at the month ahead to see if there are any scheduling issues
• Allocating days we will be away with work (we both do one to two nights away per month with our jobs)
• Scheduling bigger events like Christmas fayers, long weekend adventures, playdates with friend we don’t see enough

End of Month:

• Reviewing the family budget
• Making monthly family goals / reviewing the month

And that’s our current logistics system.  I know it will change again, and it is a lot of work to maintain, but it also means that hopefully when things start veering off course (as they usually do) we can at least right it in a week or two rather than waiting until everything implodes.

Storing Kids Artwork

When Isaac started nursery I saved all his art.  He came home with wonderful things, like painted ladybirds and finger print flowers

I quickly realized this pile was unsustainable, so switched to hanging pieces I really liked on a board in his room.  I also take photos of every piece of nursery art and put those photos in their photo albums, usually lumped together by month 

(Lilah - September 2022 page)

I throw a lot of art out after I take the photos, but I can't always get rid of everything, and I don't really think one "should".  Recently I made each kid their own art album, with is a cheap wilco binder with 25 poly pockets.  I put all their art in this, and have decided they can go through and keep whatever pieces they like the most.  

The albums were a pretty immediate hit.  Lilah almost immediately broke one of her pieces of art, so that went in the bin, but my hope is that this keeps the kids interested in their art and maybe even gets them to decide what is worth keeping and what is not.

I know I'm only 4 years into the art thing, but I am also aware that's somewhere between 25% and 50% of the amount of time kids will bring home art!  Isaac also has a large framed art display of his first year of nursery.  Lilah... doesn't.  Perhaps the kids art work project will teach them that life isn't fair.