Clothing. Collecting. Washing. Folding. Some of us even manage to put it away occasionally. Somehow this thing is second only to ‘paper’ in the “never ending self-growing piles”. With no idea how, it gets there until it becomes so much it overtakes. While always grateful and thankful for every article gifted or purchased, we have to admit at some point, we all end up with too much to manage well. As a mama with half a dozen children and a tiny home it takes even less time to hit that point. So, what do we do? I mean besides the oh so common “flip all your hangers backwards and get rid of after 6 months”? We know that and we still find ourselves paralyzed when it comes time to actually pass them on.

Here are my Top 5 Tips for Managing Clothes (whether you live in a tiny house or not).

Pack for a two week trip
No for real. Get out your carry on and pack for a 2 week vacay. If you work, make it a 2 week “bleasure” trip. Pack some casual, some dressy outfits for a fancy dinner, church clothes, swimwear, work clothes. It’s a vacay, you don’t know for sure what you’re going to do but you have a general idea of what you normally like to do. If you don’t normally go to $200 a plate dinners but typically do a local dive, you’re not likely to do that big fancy dinner, so you will need less fancy clothes. As much as we like to dream of the “one day I will…” Either we do or we don’t. And it’s totally ok to be honest about where and who you are.

Only keep your favorites
What did you pack? You packed the clothes that you like how you look and feel when wearing them. All that stuff left in your closet is there taking up space. They aren’t favorites. They probably don’t fit well or don’t make you feel good when wearing them. Most of what is left can safely go away and you likely will not miss it. Save for a few sentimental pieces. Save those in a box at the top of your closet. Once you fill the box, you can make a quilt or some other neat piece. If you don’t feel comfortable getting rid of all those clothes just yet, box them up and date it and put it in the top of your closet. In 6 months if you still haven’t used them, take the entire box (unopened of course!) to the donation center.

Release the guilt and expectations.
So many of us hold on to clothes that don’t fit. They are too small for “when we lose weight”. They are too big for that “just in case I gain a little more”. Do you know what that does to us? You know what it does. You pull out those too big jeans with the expectation that you will probably gain weight again. And feel like crap when you fit into them again. That doesn’t sound encouraging. You pull out the “too small” jeans and feel bad for gaining weight. Both cause all sorts of ugly negative thoughts to roll through your head. Get rid of them. If you gain weight, you can go get clothes that fit and make you feel good. Clothes that do not carry the “my bigger clothes” mental label. If you lose weight, you’re going to want to get new cute clothes to celebrate accomplishing your goal!

Trust for provision
We do it for ourselves and we do it even more so with our children’s clothes. Let’s be real. It’s not often you get sequential children with the same taste in clothing that are the same size at the same season. And that is ok! But as mama’s we want to hold onto the clothes from the older ones. The dreaded hand me downs. It makes sense, you already own them, why repurchase in a few years. Do we realize how fear based it is? Especially in our country of overabundance? It’s not that 2nd hand is bad at all! The issue is usually because they get no choice in the clothing. Add in that somehow you still have to store and go through multiple times to find the size and season.

Consign, Consign, Consign
Our solution has been to use the consignment store as our storage! Every 3 months the younger ones pick from the discard pile of the older ones and keep what they want (usually only a piece or two). The rest go to the consignment store and sold (or eventually donated). That revolving credit is later used by whichever child that needs (or wants) something. Any clothes that are given to us I ask “what do you want us to do with the leftovers”. Most people really don’t care as long as they don’t have to deal with the clothes anymore. If they don’t, I take those to the consignment as well. (If they do, I pass on to another family). We always get way more girl clothes given to us than boy clothes. The consignment store always has a decent selection of boy’s clothes. Some cities have city wide events a couple times a year. I use to do these but found the more children we had and with the smaller storage, I couldn’t hold onto the clothing until the next seasonal sale. The local store allows me to drop off as we pull them out and use the credit as we need it instead of all at once.