31 Days of Organizing Tips: Day 19 (Playrooms)

Welcome to Day Nineteen of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series!  Throughout this series I’m sharing organizing tips that will help you on your journey from overwhelmed to organized.

Today I want to help you organize your playroom. Kids’ toys can be very overwhelming and sometimes it feels like they multiply while you sleep. Even a well-organized playroom needs tweaking from time to time because kids’ toys change over time and they may outgrow the systems that worked previously. Plus, playrooms get a lot of use!

No matter what age your kids are, you probably have a lot of toys. With little ones, it’s often big things like ride-on toys, play kitchens, tool benches, trucks, and Fisher Price castles, school houses, or garages, as well as collections of blocks and wooden train tracks. School aged kids move on to Barbies, action figures, My Little Pony, and Lego, as well as puzzles and games. Older kids have an increasing collection of entertainment items like electronic games, gaming system accessories and probably still a lot of Lego and stuffed animals. All of these toys need to be organized so that everything has a place and there is a place for everything.

Playrooms can be organized in ways that will help control the chaos and also allow your kids to enjoy their toys without you losing your mind dealing with a big mess. If you don’t have a designated playroom, these tips apply for wherever your kids keep their toys (bedrooms, family room, basement, etc.).

Here are a few tips to help you organize your playroom:

• Purge regularly!  As your kids outgrow toys, give them away.  Before birthdays and Christmas declutter some of the toys they are not playing with anymore so you have room for the new ones. Follow the “one in, one out” rule with toys (or if you haven’t been very good about purging you may want to start with “one in, two out”!).
• Group collections of toys together and store them in containers. I’ll share pictures of lots of great container options below.  
• Label the containers so toys can always be returned to where they belong. If you have young children who can’t read, use pictures to label instead of words (or use both – early word association never hurts!).
• Help your children learn to only play with one toy at a time.  It makes clean up SO much easier. Having your toys grouped in containers really helps with this.
• Set up sections in your playroom based on different types of activities. For example, have a toy area, a reading nook, a dress-up closet, a puzzle/games cupboard, and an art/craft zone. This will help keep the items used for each of these activities separate.  
• Teach your kids where everything belongs so they can help keep it organized. Or better yet, involve them in the process of organizing! 🙂

OK, enough talk.  Here are several examples of these tips in action to give you ideas and inspiration. Each picture has a link below it that will take you to a blog post with LOTS of other pictures and ideas too.

1.  Here’s a mix of baskets, pails, and drawers to store books, toys, DVDs, games, and gaming systems.  I like the pretty colours too.

Toy Organization

2.  I like the labels on these pails and baskets.

Storing Children’s Toys & Books

3.  If you don’t like a lot of visual clutter, using wicker or coloured baskets or bins for different categories of toys really helps a playroom look neat and tidy. I love the chalk labels on these wicker baskets, making it easy to find toys and easy to put them away!

Playroom & Toy Organization

4. If you prefer clear baskets or bins so your kids can see what’s in each of them, then use those. You can still label them if you’d like, to help reinforce the concept that everything has a place.

Clear Toy Bins

5. When my kids were younger, we had two sets of these toy bins. As my kids grew we could change up the categories to reflect their current toys. They liked having open bins so they could see what was in them.

Organizing Toy Bins

Please remember to pin these pictures from the original source.  

Most of these bloggers admit that their playrooms don’t always look this organized and tidy (and many of them show pictures to prove it!) so don’t get overwhelmed thinking your playroom can never look as nice as these 🙂 We live in our homes so we can’t expect them to be perfect all the time. The key is to draw ideas from these playrooms or others online and figure out what will work for you. Once you put an organized system in place, it will be far easier to maintain it. It’s worth the initial time and effort!

For Day Nineteen, go through the toys in your house and purge. Group the toys you want to keep into categories and find suitable containers for them. Figure out the best layout for your playroom and organize it in a way that will work for you, your kids, and their toys.  Show your kids how you’ve organized it and get them on board for keeping it that way.

For more ideas on organizing kids’ things, follow my Pinterest board.

How do you organize your playroom?  What’s the best organizing tip you’ve implemented?

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else. 

Happy organizing!