Receiving, storing and remembering to retrieve hand-me-downs…

We frequently receive bags of hand-me-downs from friends.  I am always grateful, but sometimes there’s the lazy inner-me saying, ‘oh-no, that’s a lot of work.’ 

Hand-me-downs are a bit of work, but to make the job easier, I try to calculate the cost per hour – it seems weird to monetize the process, but it really helps motivate me to see the value. 

Today’s hand-me-down boxes contained:

Lia	Tessa	Mariner	Severin	Eli
5 dresses 1 pair sandals 2 bathing suits	Teevas 4 pair shorts 1 shirt	Hand-me-down shirts for next year (school uniform)	-	-

Estimated savings:

Sandals Lia	10
Sandals Teevas	20
5 dresses	50
2 bathing suits	18
4 pair shorts	30
1 shirt	5
Hand-me-down shirts (uniform)	30
Savings	163

I am estimating costs just from memory for purchasing used, new and online.  My time spent was about 1.5 hours to organize and sort the winter items and pull out the summer.

What’s the savings for conserving Earth’s resources by not buying new?  A lot of water, manufacturing, transportation…there’s a definite savings to the planet.  I would like to better calculate the environmental savings.  

I can estimate we have saved water from a Treehugger article on how much water is used to manufacture certain goods.  If I guess we saved 4 pounds of clothing, then I was assume we saved at least 400 gallons of water used to grow the cotton...

Thank you friends for the hand-me-downs – every penny matters in our home, and your kindness is appreciated!