Playroom Organization

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It is post Christmas and your house may look like mad chaos --- I know mine does! Toys are literally everywhere. I always try to purge a good portion of our outdated and unused toys before the big day, but I never feel like it is enough. Today I went through more of the boys toys to donate. Now we have a massive pile of items in our basement that needs to be sent off. It has open up some space to make room for some of the newer toys have joined the playroom. For myself, I am a bit OCD so  I have to have the toys organized and hidden away. I can tell you that it never stays completely organized. As you know, the littles don't always put them away where they belong so every few weeks I sort through them. We also have a catch all bin in our living room for toys that do not make it back to the playroom. This storage basket gets emptied at the end of the week and put back where it belongs. It is usually filled with their most played toys for the week, so it is easy access for them.  As I was sorting through my toys, I thought I'd share with you what toy organization works best for our little family and hopefully helps inspire you to create a less clutter space in your home. I'd say 12/26 most asked question from parents is what do you do for toy storage? I am going to share all the deets below.

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Photo from Project Foundation Lane
Medfield, Massachusetts

Determining your storage solution

Since our playroom is still under construction (reveal TBD), I am going to share my design plan from Foundation Lane, which can work in any household area as well. You may not have as many cabinets, but it will work just as well. The storage cabinet that I recommend the most is the IKEA brimnes cabinet with doors. It is such a sturdy piece that is fairly easy to put together. Picture to the left you can see multiple of them pushed together. We added a wood top to make them look more custom. Honestly, I could not be happier with them. The doors are easy to open and close for the littles too. The other key part about these cabinets is the shelves are adjustable so you can make them your own and use your preference of baskets for toys. I will be sharing some of my favorite baskets for toy storage below. Prior to our playroom refresh, I did have the storage cubbies, which was functional, but I wanted everything to be hidden so the closed cabinets were life changing. 

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How do I organize my toys?

Organizing the toys can be a process and determining how to group them can feel overwhelming. It will really depend on the size of the toys, what your child may be into, and how often a toy is played with. For our little family, this is what works best for us, but I know it may not work for everyone. 
Larger bins are filled with the following: 

• Tools, PJ Masks Toy, Cars, Dress Up Clothes, Educational Toys, and most played with toys by my one year old.

Woven baskets are filled with the following:

• Dinosaurs, tea set, dolls, brain break games, arts and crafts, camping toys,

Plastic bins with lids are filled with the following:

• Puzzle pieces, various magnets, little people characters, blocks, magnatiles, and tv show characters

Some day I will get around to labeling them. 

My littlest grabbing a bin from his toy storage cabinet.

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Various Storage Baskets

Even though the baskets are hidden, I like to have a variety of different types of baskets that provide different textures to the room. Most of the time our little ones are dragging the baskets out of the cabinet and playing with them in various rooms in the house. It is also key to have different size baskets to accommodate multiple types of toys. Unfortunately two of the baskets shown in the photo above are no longer available, but I have sourced out some comparable ones. I have added captions to each item so you can roughly see what I use them for. 

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I hope you find this post helpful. I honestly feel that having everything hidden helps promote playtime as little ones will only pull out one item/basket and focus on that one thing for a short period of time. Much like myself, when I am surrounded by clutter, I tend to lose focus and it is hard for me to concentrate. By keeping items organized, it helps when one of my littles are looking for something specific that I can easily find it for them. Playrooms do not always needs to be chaotic - they can be organized chaos.