Off-Season gear (clothes) storage

[ND1612]

Living in the frozen north, bulky winter gear is a fact of life. It takes up a ton of closet space for the other 8 months of the year though. I've been working on cleaning up my gear closet and found these big Hefty Max shrink-pak vacuum bags that seem to be working really well. The clothes pack down to probably less than 1/4 of the thickness than if they were all hanging side by side. They're nice thick plastic, so I'm thinking they should keep the "house smells" from cooking and stuff away in the off season too.

Maybe a good alternative to having a wall of totes in the garage or house.

The Jumbo bags are good for bibs and coats. One of these bags has two full sets of ice fishing floatation bibs and coats. The other has my insulated Carhartt bibs, snowmobiling bibs, a pair of insulated Banded waterfowl bibs and some insulated wader pants. Easy to stack them and slide under a bed out of the way.



I also got some of the hanging bags and they seem to work well for sweatshirts and jackets. Each bag has spots for 5 hangers.

 

[nobody]

Good idea. I would be concerned with storing any bulky “puffy” gear like that though, as storing down and synthetic down in a compressed state tends to deteriorate insulation abilities. Does that worry you? Or do you not put those pieces in these bags?

 

[hereinaz]

We do this with some clothes and linens.

I find the sheets and blankets that come out of vaccum bags have their own “flavor”.

Agreed, don’t store anything puffy or fluffy in there.

 

[ND1612]

Good idea. I would be concerned with storing any bulky “puffy” gear like that though, as storing down and synthetic down in a compressed state tends to deteriorate insulation abilities. Does that worry you? Or do you not put those pieces in these bags?

Yeah I kept all of my "technical" type puffy/insulated hunting clothes on hangers still. I just went with the simple cotton and fleece or synthetic hoodies and Thinsulate type bibs - basically the things I figured would fluff back up alright with a ride in the dryer.