It’s easy to get caught up in the joy, exhaustion, and often stress of having a newborn baby. And once you’ve passed the initial hurdles, the next ongoing cycle will be monitoring and managing your baby’s growth.
Babies, especially newborns, grow at an unbelievably fast rate. For example, from birth to the age of six months, a baby will normally grow between half an inch to 1 inch each month, and gain between 5 to 7 ounces each week.
With this steady growth comes a need to constantly find clothing that fits the baby’s ever-changing size. Depending on how many children you have, this can involve buying a steady stream of new outfits, all of which need somewhere to be stored when your baby has grown out of them.
Given that having a newborn baby tends to be particularly chaotic, you may find that having all of their belongings neatly organized can do wonders for decluttering your home and easing your mind.
Luckily, we’re on hand with some handy tips on how to store baby clothes to make your lives with a newborn that little bit easier.
1. Wash Everything
When putting clothes into storage for what could potentially be a long time, the best thing to do is to wash them before folding them up to be stored away. This way, when you take the clothes back out again they will be ready to wear.
However, if you’re thinking about storing clothes for the long term, make sure that the items are completely dry before being put into storage. If not, you run the risk of the clothes becoming moldy while they’re in storage.
It’s also a good idea to remove any stains on clothes before you store them away. The longer the stains stay on clothing, the tougher they can be to remove.
2. Sort & Organize
As with any storage space, they can be optimized to fit more items in and less stressful to look at as long as they’re well organized and decluttered. This way, whenever it’s time to revisit a storage unit, identifying items will be easy.
When it comes to baby clothes, a useful exercise is to separate them into piles by size, like so:
- 0-3 months
- 3-6 months
- 6-9 months
- 9+ months
It’s also helpful to store away clothes that are too big for your baby, who can grow into them with time.
Some may also benefit from sorting their baby’s clothes by season and swapping the items in their wardrobe around accordingly.
And, as always, be ruthless. Although baby clothes tend to hold more sentimental value than other objects you might put into storage, keeping items that are stained or damaged doesn’t make sense. Any unused items of clothing in good condition can be donated.
3. Choose a Storage Container
Depending on the location you choose to store your baby clothes in, some containers might be more useful than others.
For example, if you plan to store baby clothes in an unused wardrobe inside your house, divider boxes will help you optimize the space available and split items up into clothing categories of:
- T-shirts
- Leggings
- Shorts
If there’s space you can also hang up baby shoes in wardrobes using clothes pegs. On the other hand, if you’re considering how to store baby clothes in a garage, simply vacuum packing them or separating the clothing into stacked plastic boxes will do the trick.
4. Label
Our most important baby clothing storage tip is to label the boxes or packets of items you’re storing away.
The worst possible scenario when you’ve packed things up into storage is to forget what items have been stored and where. This can lead to countless hours of wasted time searching for items in the long term.
To avoid these problems, make sure each of your boxes of baby clothes is clearly labeled with the items they contain, their size, and the season they are for.
5. Location
A final consideration for baby clothing storage is to think about the space in which you plan to keep your boxes or vacuum-packed bags.
As mentioned beforehand, some might be lucky enough to have extra wardrobe space to use, but others might have to resort to extra garage or attic space to store their baby’s clothing until it will next be needed.
Also, if you’re really struggling to find extra storage space, you might want to think about renting some space either in a storage unit or using our platform.
Wherever you decide to store your baby’s clothes, consider the humidity and temperature of the area beforehand and adjust the amount of time they are stored for accordingly.
Have you run out of space to store your baby’s outgrown clothes? Explore Stache’s storage options near you.
Wrapping Up
So there you have it, deciding how to store baby clothes is relatively straightforward and can be done quickly when you set your mind to it.
Although it may seem taxing at the time, the long term benefits of storing and organizing your outgrown baby clothes will be worth it in the end!