5 Tips to Organize Your Playroom

This is a guest post from Larisha of We're Parents!?

The holiday season has officially came to an end and you have hopefully started or finished taking down your Christmas decorations.  However, if you were anything like us in the past year, this only leads to one HUGE glaring issue.  What in the world are you going to do with all these toys!?

Toy room organization has always been a difficult task for me and I just couldn’t seem to get it together.  That is, until the beginning of this year, when I was just run down, tired of stepping on toys, and realized that we desperately needed a different solution than what we currently had going on in our toddler’s playroom. I thought we had a good system before, but after the holidays, it was clear that nothing was currently working.  Here’s the 5 steps we took to optimal toy room organization.

Step 1: PURGE 
There is about a 99.999% probability that there are a multitude of toys that your child(ren) doesn’t play with.  It’s either too young for them, they were just never interested in it, or it could even be broken.  Go through every single thing in the toy room and decide what can stay and what can go.  You can either consign or donate what you decide to purge.

Step 2: Organize by category
One of the best tips to having a clean toy room is to be organized.  Legos in one area, puzzles and games in another, trains and cars, dress up clothes, etc.  Make piles for category that you have in the playroom.

Step 3: Get organization materials 
Look at the piles that you have.  How many different containers and storage solutions do you need?  It could be as little as 3 or as many after 20, but it’s important to know what you need for this. We suggest getting these three things:

• Bookcase
• This is an easy way to store a lot of different things in one compact area of the toyroom
• Organization bins and baskets
• Go through your house and grab different sized bins, baskets, and containers, that you may no longer be using as an inexpensive way for storage solutions.  You can also pick up the remainder that you need from somewhere like Ikea or The Container Store


• Hanging or vertical storage
• I always recommend at least one hanging or vertical storage solution.  Whether that’s hooks to hang something on, shelving, or a larger bookcase that extends vertically, having different points of reach will help keep organized.

Step 4: HIDE stuff

This may sound silly, but it’s important.  Whether in a closet, basement, or attic, put some things away.  Every 2-3 months rotate the toys to keep your child interested in what they are playing with.  This will help them want to keep organized and engaged in the play space as well. 

Step 5: Clean up everyday WITH your child

This is probably the most important thing.  The more you make your child help you clean, the more invested they become, especially at a young age.  They realize that they are going to have to clean up everything that they pulled and will start to put things away on their own without realizing it.  This also helps you feel better about the space when it starts out on a blank slate everyday. 

We hope these tips help you keep organized!  What tips do you have that we didn’t include?

About the author: Larisha is a a full time work-at-home mother to one little girl from New Jersey.  She is currently a social media manager and the award-winning owner of the blog We're Parents!?- a parenting blog that focuses on natural parenting.  When not chasing her toddler around, Larisha enjoys learning photography and being in the kitchen whipping up new recipes. She's a lover of all things Nutella and doughtnuts. You can follow her full time at www.wereparentsblog.com

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