How To Declutter + Organize Toys
Before I (or any of my friends) had children, I remember walking into the houses of those who did and being horrified…blocks in a tumbled-down heap on the kitchen floor, dress-up clothes strewn all over the couch, cars under the toilet. My house will never look like this, I thought. But just a few years and a couple of kids later, I realized that toys creeping out from the requisite toy box is inevitable, and takes a huge amount of energy to combat.
Since that moment of realization, my husband and I have tried a slew of products meant specifically for organizing toys, but it was only recently that we faced the truth. It’s not the product but the process that can free you from having toys take over your home. Here are my key tips for how to declutter and organize toys (and maintain the system once it's in place!):
1. Separate the active vs. inactive toys
Take a good hard look at the toys in your home. Does your four-year-old use the Fisher-Price farm set? Do you have two-dozen puzzles? Too much stuff can be really overwhelming for kids, not to mention the adults who have to live among it. Once your child has finished playing for the day (or at the end of the week), separate the active vs. inactive toys.
2. Organize the active toys
Based on your findings from #1 above, organize these toys based on the way your child plays (dolls and clothes together, trains and tracks together, Legos separate from Duplos, etc.).
3. Get rid of the inactive toys
Donate or sell the inactive toys. Offer up toys to your friends with younger kids or look for community donation opportunities. Some cities have community Facebook groups solely devoted to connecting people who are giving away or looking for items.
4. Choose a home
You don’t have to have a playroom to have a “primary residence” for toys. Dedicate a corner of the living room, your child’s room, or a room in the house that’s not used very often. Depending on how your home is laid out, you may want to select one more “vacation home.” This allows for distribution of different types of toys, particularly if your child plays on two different floors. For example, the majority of our sons’ toys are kept in our sunroom on the first floor, but we keep big trucks and the bowling and ring toss sets in the basement.
5. Store based on your décor
Where you store your child’s toys doesn’t have to be plastic and primary-colored, but it does need to be child-accessible or else you’re going to be called to action whenever your child wants the Duplo blocks. Consider where in your house you’ve chosen to store toys. For example, go vertical with shelving and baskets if you have enough wall space. A console with sliding doors works nicely in a room that isn’t just for toys. A storage ottoman is terrific for a living room. In our house, we use IKEA shelving with a combination of plastic beverage tubs (to hold chunky toys like bristle blocks and train tracks), plastic lidded boxes (to hold toys that have smaller pieces like Legos and Playmobil), and built in rattan baskets for puzzles, games, and dress-up clothes.
6. Explain the toy system to your kid
Once you’ve landed on your toy storage system, explain where everything “lives” to your kid. If you have the time and inclination, take pictures of the contents of each container, then laminate and affix them as labels for pre-readers (even better, include the word and the picture).
7. Collect in key areas
It’s inevitable – toys will make their way from where they’re stored to other areas of the house. Figure out where those areas are (for us, it’s the kitchen and the car) and create runaway toy collection spots.
8. Get into a toy cleanup routine with your kid(s)
This is the key final step! Whether it’s every night or the end of every week, you and your child can work as a team to clean up – return the runaway toys to their homes and pick up the main play area. If the system is working, and every toy truly has a place, this part shouldn’t take much more than a few minutes each night or 15-30 minutes once a week. Bottom line: YOU should not be solely responsible for cleaning up the toys; it's a family responsibility!
Once you declutter and organize toys, the final key step is to get into a tidy-up routine with your kids; YOU should not be solely responsible for toy cleanup!
Featured photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash