When you live in a city space is a premium. I remember growing up and most houses had room dedicated to a certain function. Think living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms, play areas etc. Today, most houses have multipurpose rooms! When you have kids, no matter how hard you try your living space becomes the dumping grounds for toys. Here are some tips to organizing toys in your living space.
{Organizing Toys In Your Living Space}
Purge
It’s VERY likely that your child has either:
- outgrown many of their toys
- forgotten about some of the their toys
- never liked some of their toys
This is the perfect opportunity to purge. When your little one is asleep take out ALL the toys that are in your living space and categorize them. If they are still young you can do this on your own. Take anything they don’t play with or have outgrown and set it aside to be donated or given away. If they are older, you may want to involve them in the process. T is still quite young, but when he’s older my game plan is to categorize toys by type (stuffed animals, cars etc). and let him keep a certain amount.
If there are some items you feel they may play with in the future, store them some where and rotate out their toys. It will be like they are new again!
Group Toys Together
As much as possible, I try to group toys together. I got this idea from all the drop-ins we’ve visited. Not only does it help with organizing toys in your living space, but when your child is old enough they will be able to help clean up in a way that makes sense. Rather than just throwing everything into a junk bin / drawer or (gasp) under their bed!
Some groupings that made sense for us:
- play kitchen utensils
- play kitchen food
- balls
- cars
- Lego/Duplo
- stuffed animals
- puzzles
Use Several Smaller Boxes
When we first started accumulating toys for T I had a large toy bag that I used to throw everything into. This worked when he was younger, but as he got older the toys got noisier and bigger! Having everything in one big bin proved to be a big mess since he would almost always pull out EVERYTHING just to get whatever it was he wanted at the bottom. Also, there was so much empty space in between the toys in the bin so many of them ended up “stored” on the floor or our coffee table. Organizing toys in your living space is SO much easier with several small boxes. I picked up Foldable Fabric Storage Containers
Store Toys In Groups
Since I had already grouped all of T’s toys together it was really easy for me to throw similar toys into boxes. It makes clean up SO much easier and I notice that when he’s playing he actually only looks to one box at a time rather than grabbing all of them. I used the large toy bag for stuffed animals (since they can kind of be squished down) and larger toys.
Label Boxes
I haven’t done this step yet but my plan is to find labels to attach to each box with their categories. I’m hoping this will help T learn where each of his toys belongs and help him read too!
Continue to Purge and Rotate
Probably the biggest tip to organizing toys in your living space is to continually go through the process of purging and rotating toys. For the most part I like how our bins have somewhat make the main area of our house livable again so the plan is to re-evaluate a couple times a year. Also, if any of the boxes overflow then it’s time to move some toys out!
