Let’s talk about toys.
As a kid, you love them.
As a parent, well, I’m about ready to throw them all out and just give each kid an iPad.
In our last house, I didn’t have much room in the kids’ rooms for toys.
But I did happen to have a nice walk-in hall closet. I also had two other small hall closets that I decided to make do for all my linens, so I turned the 4′ x 4′ walk-in closet into a TOY CLOSET! Pretty much ALL of the kids’ toys went into the closet.
It was great because behind those closed doors, even if it was a little messy at times, I didn’t have multicolored toy bins staring me in the face.
I liked the idea so much that in my new house I decided to have some of the kids share a bedroom just to make another bedroom into an exclusive guest room / toy room.
PROs:
- Bedroom stays a lot cleaner
- Bedroom is always a lot less cluttered
- Bedroom feels more peaceful
- Toys and clothes are automatically separated so less time sifting through these things
- Bedtime routine goes faster if you don’t have to clean up toys as often
- Overall more time saved
- You have to make an effort to go through all the toys once in a while if you don’t do it every day
Voila my toy closet in the guest room:
You can see that this is a regular “reach-in” style closet. I didn’t even take out the hanging bar (yet!). But some inexpensive shelving from the home improvement store and some plastic toy bins have saved my sanity! I also like to keep the bins labeled.
I do have a few things in the bedrooms, but they are also behind closed doors or out of sight (one box under a bed). If I have friends over with little kids, the bedrooms can just be locked so they stay out of the breakable toys, and just the toy room can be used.
In a later post I’ll share how I use this as a guest room as well.
Do you have a space dedicated for toys? What do you do? I’d love to hear from you!
Organized 'Ohana 