{Organising} My kids’ organised playroom

With most of South Africa on leave between Christmas and New Year’s, this is the ideal time to tackle a slightly bigger organising project because there’s a bit more time.

I’ve been decluttering smaller summer clothes, tidying wardrobes, decluttering my stash of gift wrap and gift bags (and I’ve only ever bought about 1/4 of it all), decluttering more clothes and since I organised this playroom about a month ago, I’ve tidied it up at least once a week.

There is no before picture because I was inspired late one night at 11 pm after reading a post on Erin’s blog.

The difference is this time it’s been a quick tidy and not a two-hour project.

This is the playroom and there are three zones:

1. two armchairs on the left for reading
2. a table for arts and crafts, building Lego, etc.
3. storage in the bookshelf on the right

(I talk you through zones in 7 easy steps to organise your office. Though the focus is on papers, storage and such, the principles apply to organising any space.)

Top shelf: colouring, workbooks, magazines for cutting and pasting (these are about 3 – 4 years old), sketchbooks, and so on. The pink and blue boxes have personal stationery and small notebooks, and there are card games in the middle.

Small notebooks…

 

and flashcards

The middle shelf has Lego, army men, small cars and various animals. These all participate in the imaginary play so they live together.

And then on the bottom shelf, there are a million puzzles (I’ve decluttered some). There are about 10 in the bottom box with the green lid and 4 in the box with the purple lid, plus those two in the boxes. I’m very fussy about puzzles simply because it’s impossible to pass them on to other friends if pieces are missing so I make sure they count the pieces as they’re packing them away after playing.

The box on the right contains plain wooden blocks, a train set from when Connor was 18 months and a couple of other wooden sets with road signs, street lamps, etc. for playing “cities”. I love wooden toys so I keep them because the kids keep using them in different ways. For example, they play with them as imaginary play now whereas when they were 18 – 24 months, they were working on fine motor skills, putting differently-shaped blocks together to make the train.

And that’s what it looks like now.  

Remember you don’t make to make things Pinterest-perfect for it to be functional and not drive you crazy. I like to shop the house first and so I found that I had all of these containers; in some cases, I just needed to shift a few things around.

Have I inspired you to organise your kids’ toys?

What will you organise this weekend?