Bring order to the kingdom of play time: helpful hints to organise toys for your kids

You love your children, but they are messy aren’t they? Don’t lie. As wonderful as they are, their toy bins can sometimes look like endless collections of toys that lack reason of any form. Your children might try to put them away once they are done playing, but their organisation is not going to make very much sense and it could mean up-ending the toy chest to find one toy.

There are a few ways that can help you intelligently organise toys for your child. The toy chest, though useful, has been proven to lack a certain capacity of organisation. Thanks to the efforts of many inventive parents and their playful kids, we have compiled some of the best ways to organise your children’s toys in a way that will look as fun and creative as the games they play.

The Benefits of Vertical Organisation

Kids need space to run around, build forts, and imagine new worlds. A large grassy yard is so desirable to most children because of the amount of space at their disposal. Maintaining a large play area in their room is just as attractive and fun to them. One way to ensure that all their toys are kept in order and their room remains uncluttered from containers is the use of vertical space. Aside from posters and drawing, a child’s walls have some much unused potential. Some options are easy while some will require you to break out the paint and nails to create something your child can use and treasure.

Laundry Baskets

One of the easiest methods to organise toys is the use of laundry baskets. These plastic baskets give visibility to the bottom of the container and a wide access area. They can hold everything from toy cars, to dolls, to board games and stuffed animals. The only thing they cannot do is hold lots of small pieces. The small holes on the sides of most baskets are ill-suited for Legos, Mega Bloks and other toys with many small pieces.

Laundry baskets are great for organising toys vertically, as most laundry baskets are already built to stack on top of one another. Their design translates seamlessly from the laundry room to the play room.

Diy Option

If you are feeling ambitious, you can use laundry baskets as cabinets. Creating a collection of cubby holes with some plywood and nail, painting it to your child’s fancy afterwards, can create a vertical structure with lots of space and ease of access. Just be careful. A basket full of toys falling can be dangerous.

Hang The Board Games

Instead of reading the names of board games, wouldn’t it be so much easier to see the entire board of those games laid out? You can use the poster like nature of most board games as decoration and storage. Hanging board games from your child’s walls can be a great looking decoration and a sensible organisation method.

You can do this by attaching string to one side of the board and hanging it from nails or safety mounts on the walls. Tape based safety mounts can be found in most hardware stores. Put the game pieces in a small plastic bag and tape them to the back of the board. You now have a flashy poster that has utility and decorative worth.

Diy Option

If you want to emphasize the picturesque nature of this decoration, you can customize the board games for both functionality and flair. Using small balsa wood boards, perhaps 6 cm in width, you can super glue them to the edges of the boards and run a support piece(s) under the folding part of the boards. Paint them an appropriate colour and now your board games sit flat and stand out from the wall like well made posters.

Vertical Video Games

Many children enjoy video games in many forms. Nintendo’s Wii and Wii-U have been a smash hit with families and provide safe family content that is fun for both parents and kids. If you are such a household, no doubt you have a slew of disks, cartridges, and remotes sitting about the television area. Organising these games in a nice and easy to browse fashion just takes a little ingenuity. There are many CD organisers that run vertically.

Normally used in a car or inside a cabinet, apply the same concept to the video game disk. If your television has a cabinet, hang these vertical CD organisers from the doors. Otherwise, attach them to the side of the cabinet that the TV stands on. Ease of access and browsing is the emphasis here.

Roll Out The Toys

Put the “I” in DIY with this fun project. There is a lot of unused space underneath cabinets and beds that can be put to better use. However, just putting a container down there can lead to a heavy chest that your child has to struggle with to adjust.

A rolling wooden container can takes some effort, but it will open up the low, unused areas to storage options. There are plenty of guides online for the specific of this kind of project. The long and short of it though is a box made of plywood that can be only a meter or two or the size of a bed itself. Wheels are attached underneath so that moving this container takes little effort.

This will take some physical effort on your part, but the result can be completely worth it. I also highly recommend that you take the time to paint this moving container with something your child will enjoy. Paint the container along the theme of whatever your child has a passion for or enjoys: a space cargo container, a chest of treasure from a castle, or anything else that might come to mind.

Laundry Hampers

Subtly different from laundry baskets, hampers are usually made with off white, thick cloth with a metal or strong plastic frame. These are distinguished from baskets by the lack of holes on the sides and only a large top opening. They will occasionally have a draw string to close it.

These tools of the laundry room work marvellously with the play room to organise toys with. In particular, they are great for keeping things with tiny piece together. The only way to lose a piece is by dropping it while playing. The cloth makes sure nothing can get through and the off white colour is enough to distinguish hamper from toys. Using a marker, you can write things on the side. Whether you write what kind of toy is in there or whose toys they are, they make organisation plain and easy to understand for you and your children.