Organizing the Playroom

Today’s project veers dangerously into the area of doing laundry, but it had to be done and I do manage to get my creative juices flowing when I’m deep in an organization project. Two weeks ago when we moved the kids into one room and reorganized their toys into a rotation system I ignored the mess in our playroom (and home office/library/family room/junk room) but I knew it needed the same attention so today was the day. First here’s what the play area looked like this morning as I got underway:

Most of the mess in the playroom consisted of play food sets that go along with the toy kitchen and trains and roadway sets with the train table, plus some puzzles and a few variety baskets for good measure. One of the big clutter challenges we always face are the food sets with their multiple pieces – the kids love to dump them all out, or combine them into big baskets or backpacks of mess that then get abandoned (since they’re no fun to play with when they’re all mixed up). I hunted down all the missing / misplaced pieces from each set from around the house, and divided the food up into three separate groups, with a few dinner, dessert and breakfast sets in each group. Then I got the trains and cars into three sets, and organized the puzzles into three groups as well, in themes that reflect the themes of the initial bedroom toy sets. Here’s what the space looks like now (well, not exactly right now – right now the three sets of food that were left on the shelves are now dumped on the living room floor):

The train table only has one roadway set on it now, and the kiddos have already played with that set more today than in the past month. They are really enjoying the toy rotation. I’ve just switched things up for the first time this weekend and it went smoothly; no one complained about toys going away.