Taming toy clutter
August 7, 2007 by Sherry Osborne
Filed under Parenting
One thing I’m looking forward to in regards to my oldest daughter starting school soon is that I intend to dive into her room and really go through toys to see what I can pitch and what gets used enough to stick around. We’re in an apartment, so it’s been really easy to get overwhelmed with toy clutter.
Since the girls’ room isn’t all that big, I keep big toys and not-often-used toys in there and they tend to play with stuff in the living room mostly. I cleared off two shelves on our bookshelf, bought baskets and recycled large ice cream tubs, and I store toys there. They know that the blue basket is for train stuff, the white one for play food, the orange one for farm stuff, etc. We’re still working on making sure that they consistently put stuff away before pulling out more but it’s getting there and even on days when I grumble about picking everything up myself, it takes so little time. I can have the living room clean in about five minutes tops now.
Then it looks like this in the evening when I need to decompress:
In the right side you can see the shelves with the baskets and containers:
Julie over at Declutter It has a nice setup too for dealing with toys in the living room (though I’m still jealous of her playroom!). Also, the new Stacks and Stacks blog has a tip for taming toy clutter from a mom with nine kids. You have to stand up and listen to a mom with nine kids and a neat house!
Do you have tips for organizing your home with toys? I’d love to hear from them!
We handle it pretty much like you do – color coded bins for certain toys. We still have issues now and then with putting toys away before getting new ones out, but it does get better. The toys are all in their bedrooms now so if they don’t clean it up they’re the ones who have to live with it, and thankfully they’re at the age where that’s starting to bother them!
Thanks for the mention, Sherry! Cluttercontrolfreak is really taking off because of sites like yours. I’ve enjoyed browsing your blog!
Eva
Hey Sherry! Thanks for the mention.
Now if I could just get my kids to actually PLAY in the playroom that would be good.
Glad to know I’m not the only one waiting for school to start to do toy control. I have found it so much easier to do when my daughters aren’t around. If they are then I get “my favorite toy” (haven’t played with it in months and won’t be playing with it after 10 minutes) or “I need that” and it’s broken or missing parts. I have two extreme packrats. I think I could get rid of 95% of their stuff and it really wouldn’t affect them. So at the end of the month it’s plastic bins and black garbage bag time (must not be able to see thru bag or all efforts are wasted).
Hi Sherry,
Much like how you use “baskets and recycled large ice cream tubs”, we use see-through shoe boxes and some larger decorative bins that match our family room decor. The bins themselves were quite a mess for awhile, but now we keep the toys in the bins sorted with zippered mesh toy bags (KidsKlutterKatchers.com) that somebody in my mom’s group told me about. What doesn’t fit in the bins, we store in the closet or garage using large Rubbermaid containers we bought on sale at Target and rotate out once a month.