Somewhere in the second month of the split, a child stands in a doorway holding one sock and says, 'But my other shirt is at the other house.' You are not imagining that. Two homes mean the clothes have to be sized for two places, and most families find out the hard way that a closet which fits seven shirts does not fit fourteen. Before you buy another hoodie, count what is actually needed.
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Count by category, not by piles
Walk through each child's clothes by type: pajamas, everyday shirts, school pants, one warm layer, one dressy outfit, and underwear and socks. Write the number you have at each house next to each type. You will notice that one house holds all the pajamas and the other holds all the sneakers. That is not a failure, it is just the shape of the week, and it tells you where the gaps are.
Decide which items get a twin
Not everything needs to live in both places. A coat, a pair of rain boots, and a toothbrush usually do. A sweatshirt that gets worn once a month can travel in the bag. Make a short list of the items that must always be at each house, and let everything else move with the child. The duplicate list is the part you will keep updating, so keep it on the same page as the rest.
Check the sizes at each seasonal swap
Children grow between visits, and they grow fastest in the stretch when nobody is measuring. At each change of season, try on the shoes and check the sleeves and hems, then move anything too small to a bin and note it. A short list helps: what fits now, what is close, what is done. Hand-me-downs between houses work best when one person owns the bin and the list, so it does not turn into a guessing game.
Measure the closet and the drawers
Count the hanging space and the drawer depth at each house. A shelf that holds two weeks of clothes at one place may hold only four days at the other, and it is better to know that before the bags start coming in. If one closet is too small, decide which items move to the bag and which stay put, rather than stuffing both spaces and hoping for the best.
Set one rule for the bag
The bag is the most important piece of the whole system. Pick one bag for each trip and agree on what goes in it: clean clothes, a jacket, and any school things that go back and forth. Label it, and decide who repacks it when it comes back. A bag with no owner is how a favorite hoodie disappears for three weeks.
Once the counts are on paper, the decisions get easier. You are not buying a whole new wardrobe. You are matching what each child needs to the space each house actually has. For the bigger picture of how the week runs across both homes, The Kids' Week and Mom's Week lays out the rows side by side.