Adventures in Thrift: Clothing Five Children for Free

The laundry has been piling up on my couch all summer.  This week it reached critical mass, and I had to do something about it.  I tried ignoring it, but it didn't go away.  I thought about hiding it under a blanket, but I was afraid that giving the laundry too much privacy would encourage it to start breeding.  So without any other options, I decided to just fold it and put it away.  After wrestling with my laundry for 43 hours straight, I finally got all the clothes folded, stacked, and ready to be put away.  That's when the real problem became apparent.  I HAD NO PLACE TO PUT IT ALL!

My entire living room is covered, wall to wall, three feet deep in folded clothes.  But when I took a stack of my clothes to my bedroom to put it away, I was surprised to see that the dresser was already full.  So I put my clothes back on the couch and picked up a pile of my boys' clothes. But when I went into their room, I found their dresser was already full too!  My daughter had only a small stack of clothes, so I took it to her room to put away (surely I could find room in her closet for just a handful of shirts).  When I walked into her room, what horror awaited me? She already had a huge pile of clean laundry stacked on her bed!  When I asked her why she had so many clothes on her bed, she answered with the obvious, "I can't fit them in my drawer."

Right about now, you are probably thinking, "Why do you have so many clothes?  Are your kids spoiled?  How much do you waste on clothes that you have so many?"
The truth is I spend almost NO money on clothes.  Nearly everything we own comes in the form of free hand-me-downs.  Really.  Occasionally we need to buy someone a specific color shirt for a music recital, or we'll get the kids an outfit for their birthday or Christmas.  But 99% of the clothes in our house came to us free of charge from friends and family.  That includes my clothes too.  Most of my clothes come second hand from my sisters and my friends. The only person who doesn't get a lot of hand-me-downs is my husband.  Apparently men just don't like to share clothes as much as women and kids do (but he is a referee, and he has gotten some of his uniforms second hand from other refs who outgrew them!).

So now you're thinking, "Who wants to wear second hand clothes?  Isn't that weird?"
My little boys LOVE getting clothes from their bigger friends and cousins.  A bag of used clothes is a huge treat for my 5 and 7 year olds because wearing an admired friend's clothes makes them feel special.  My teen/pre-teen girls know that clothes from a friend are ten times more likely to be cool than the clothes I'd be likely to pick out for them.  I hate shopping, so having someone else pick out clothes for me, saves me a lot of time and trouble.  

So back to my laundry problem...
I decided we needed to get rid of some of our clothes before they took over the entire house.  So I pulled out two weeks worth of clothes for the kids (pants, shirts, undies, socks).  And guess what I had left?  One full garbage bag of clothes per kid left over!  Seven people in our family = seven giant bags of clothes to get rid of.  The sad part is I just cleaned out our closets at the beginning of the summer.  Somehow we've doubled our clothing hoard in just a month and a half!

So now what do we do with all those extra clothes?  The easy answer is to just haul them all off to the thrift store.  And that is fine (just remember to get a receipt so you can claim it as a tax deduction).  Or you could have a yard sale and make some extra cash.  I don't care much for yard sales because they are so much work, but lots of people love them, so it's up to you.  Another option is craigslist.com.  Advertise an entire summer wardrobe for "boy size 4" and you'll get plenty of people willing to buy the whole lot in one easy transaction.  However, my favorite thing to do is to pass them on. 

Since most of our clothes come to us for free from friends, whenever possible, I try to pass them on to friends for free.  My daughter loves seeing our neighbor's daughter running around in her old dresses.  It is so much easier for kids to part with a cherished item if they know it is going to a good home to be used by a special friend.

So that was our adventure this week.  We participated in the great clothing circle of life.  Not only were we able to share with friends while we got rid of some excess clutter, but we also got a chance to see how very blessed we are.  Because of the generosity of friends, our closet runneth over.

Marcia