13+ Brilliant Ways to Store Hand Me Down Clothes
These brilliant ideas for how to store hand me down clothes will help you stay organized! Make your hand-me-downs neat, tidy, and easily accessible so you can always find the clothing you need for your kids!
Storing hand-me-down clothes sounds great in theory.
You’re doing the environment a favor by using clothes for multiple children instead of tossing them out.
You save money since you don’t have to purchase a completely new wardrobe for your child.
And you don’t have to spend the time, effort, or frustration that comes with shopping for clothes with kids!
But in practice, keeping hand-me-downs organized so you can actually use them can be a bit trickier.
Hand-me-downs can take up a lot of space. It’s hard to remember what you have. And getting out the right size for the right kid at the right time can be difficult!
In this post, I want to help you streamline the process of storing hand-me-down clothes so hand-me-downs become a blessing and not a burden!
Top Tips for Storing Hand Me Down Clothes
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
1. Mark you calendar with clothing swap dates for spring and fall.
In order to make the most of hand-me-downs, it’s important to work a clothing swap into our yearly routine.
Toni from A Bowl Full of Lemons recommends swapping clothes in spring and fall, which just happens to line up perfectly with weather changes and the kids getting out of / going back to school.
Putting eyes on our hand-me-downs twice per year is a great way to remind ourselves what we have in storage. It also allows us to grab the correct sizes of clothes for our kiddos before they grow out of them!
2. Declutter potential hand-me-downs before storing them.
When we’re doing our twice yearly clothing swap, it’s tempting to just throw all of the clothes in bins and call it a day.
But we will be thanking ourselves later if we only hold on to the clothes that our kids will actually wear.
For example, my older son is really into hockey and has accumulated a bunch of t-shirts from hockey teams and tournaments over the years. But my younger son has no interest in hockey and wouldn’t wear his brother’s team shirts, even if they were a perfect fit.
When we’re rotating clothes then, I might keep a hockey shirt or two for my older son’s memory bin, but all of the others get donated so another hockey-loving kid can enjoy them. And our hand-me-down drawers aren’t cluttered with clothes that will never be worn again anyway. Win-win!
3. Create clear size labels for hand-me-downs. (Bonus points if they’re pretty!)
Emily from Small Stuff Counts used her Cricut Joy cutting machine to create cute labels for her kids’ hand-me-downs.
Not only does this make the stored hand-me-down clothes more visually appealing, but it also makes it easy for Emily to find the correct size of clothes for her kids whenever she needs them.
4. Create an inventory tracker to include with stored hand-me-downs.
It can be nice to be able to see exactly which hand-me-downs we have in each size at a glance.
When my boys were little, I created these simple inventory tags to help me keep track of what we owned so I could find what I needed quickly and easily. You can snag these free printable tags here.
5. Store hand-me-down shoes in their own container.
Shoes can be bulky and make our bins/drawers feel chaotic if we try to store them with folded clothes.
To keep items more organized, give shoes their own hand-me-down bin, placing larger shoes at the bottom of the bin and smaller ones on top so you can use them in order.
6. Keep a “too small” bin inside kids’ closets.
It can be a pain to try to dig through the hand-me-down bins in between our spring and fall clothing swap sessions.
Instead, I like to keep a “too small” bin in my kids’ closet. This makes it easy for them to discard anything that no longer fits.
And then next time we do a clothing swap, I can grab the clothes from the “too small” bin and add them to the rest of the hand-me-downs.
Can you spot the bin peeking out from the back corner of the closet? 😉
7. Use vacuum sealed bags to keep your hand me down clothes neat and tidy while saving space.
If you don’t have a ton of space to store hand me down clothes, Mandi from Moments with Mandi recommends storing them in vacuum sealed storage bags!
This will help clothes take up as little space as possible so your hand me downs won’t be in the way.
Get all of Mandi’s tips for storing hand me down clothes here.
8. File fold your hand me downs into small boxes within a drawer to stay organized.
I love file folding because it allows me to see everything we have! I use IKEA’s SKUBB boxes to divide up the drawer and keep everything looking neat and tidy.
9. Keep hand-me-downs on the same level of the house as the kids’ rooms, if possible.
I knew that if my kids’ hand-me-downs were in our basement– two levels down from their bedroom– I would never take the time or effort to swap them out!
Instead, I opted to keep their hand-me-down clothes in a dresser in our guest bedroom, which is right next door to the kids’ room. This makes it super easy when it comes time to switch out clothes!
When we lived in a small townhouse and didn’t have a guest room or extra dresser space to spare, I kept the boys’ hand-me-downs in the back of their closet.
This maximized the otherwise unused space and kept hand-me-down clothes close by.
10. Use the dot system to pass down items from sibling to sibling.
Jordan from Fun, Cheap, or Free is a mom of 8, so she knows alllllllll about hand-me-downs!
Jordan uses a genius dot system to keep track of who should get what clothes next.
When the oldest sibling is finished with a clothing item, she draws a single dot on the tag to note that it is ready for sibling #2 when he/she needs it. When the second sibling is done with the item, Jordan adds a second dot, and so on.
This system makes it easy to see at a glance who should get which clothes next!
Learn more about Jordan’s system and get the rest of her tips here.
11. Create hanging labels for the closet to separate various sizes
If you have more hanging space to spare than drawer or storage tub space, closets can be a great place to store hand-me-downs!
When my boys were little, I used simple printable tags to separate their clothing items by size so I could easily grab the size they needed.
Find all my favorite printables for organizing hand me down clothes here.
12. Store hand-me-downs in drawers rather than lidded bins.
When I have the choice, I always try to store items in drawers rather than stacked bins.
Stacked bins can be a pain because you’re always having to un-stack and re-stack them to get to the items you need.
Drawers can be stacked to maximize space. But when you need something, you can simply open the drawer, pull out what you want, and close the drawer again, making clothes so much easier to access.
13. Store hand-me-down sports equipment close to currently used sports equipment.
Finally, sports equipment can be handed down too! I always try to store our sports hand-me-downs near where we store the currently-in-use sports equipment so I don’t forget about them.
We use these shelves in our garage to keep our hockey gear neat and organized.
Learn more about how we organize hockey equipment in this post.
Organizing Hand-Me-Downs: Final Thoughts
It can be tricky to store hand-me-down clothes, but it’s not impossible!
If you are able to put a solid system in place using the ideas from this post, you will be thanking yourself when you are able to save a ton of time, money, and frustration.
Happy organizing!
More Storage Ideas for Kids’ Spaces
If you’ll be organizing your own space in the near future and these ideas were helpful, be sure to pin the image below so you can reference them later!
Thank you for following along! Have a wonderful day!
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
