Kids Drawer Organizing | Practical Perfection

Let’s face it – kids are busy! And they couldn’t care less if their rooms were clean. There are too many forts to build, too many balls to catch, and too many snacks to eat. But as a Mom, I feel like teaching my kids cleanliness and organization is a life skill that I have to do my best to teach them. Some days it sinks in, but mostly it feels like a losing battle.

Folding Clothes like Marie Kondo

I happened to watch the brilliant new show that came out in January 2019 on Netflix, called Tidying up with Marie Kondo. I love this show and although it was a bit slower moving than I would have liked at times, there were some incredible principles that she taught! One principle that she teaches that is taking the world by storm, is how we fold our clothes. Like most of the world, I always folded my clothes and then stacked them on top of one another. This makes it difficult to see what items I really have. And my nicely folded clothes are messed up the instant you reach for something further down in the pile. Marie Kondo describes her method as more of a ‘file folding’ system.

Pros and Cons of Folding in a Filing System

I was quite skeptical of this new folding method, insisting that it takes up too much of my time and that it would never stay looking this nice. Here is what I learned:

It only takes up a lot of time for the initial set up – think about it! How many pairs of pants do you actually wear in a week? Not a whole drawer full, that’s for sure.
It isn’t very hard to upkeep because of how things are folded. Most types of material will stay folded even when adjacent pairs of pants are pulled out. If you do it right, they stand up on their own.
This method isn’t super sustainable with slippery materials that have a difficult time standing up on their own. That is unless you have tons of them in a row and the clothes are packed tight enough to keep each other up. Athletic clothes are particularly difficult.

Folding Clothes like Marie

I took the drawer organizing one step further and purchased the SKUBB drawer organizer set from Ikea to help keep my son’s sock and underwear drawer clean. The boxes didn’t fit his drawer perfectly so I used binder clips to clip the boxes together so it didn’t move around so much when we opened the drawer. It was a simple solution for a small problem, but it worked!