Toy Organization

Alright, I know I haven't been keeping up with the organizing challenge the last few days. It's just that my home doesn't have some of the areas suggested and the ones I do have are already pretty organized. Since I don't have shocking before pictures or creative storage ideas, I decided not to participate in those challenges. So I'm not a organization challenge dropout, I just ditched class for a few days. :)

Today's challenge though - toy organization - is an area that I worked on just last week. I don't have any before pictures because only intended to help Jeremy find places to put his new toys that he received for Christmas. Then it turned into a 3 1/2 hour toy purge. The best "before" picture I have is one of everything that was removed from his room:

Two bags of trash (mainly broken toys and clothes with holes or stains), three bags of out grown clothes, and ten bags of toys that either: he no longer plays with or are out of season.

As you can see, he still has a TON of toys. Between us, his grandparents, godparents, aunts, hand-me-downs, etc. he gets a lot of toys and it has been awhile since we went through and did a major cleaning.

Jeremy plays with all of his toys pretty regularly so he generally doesn't want to get rid of anything. So I usually just go through his toys when he isn't around and pull out the broken ones and those that are played with the least. Then if he finds the bags somehow, he gets upset and tries to get them back.

This time though, I gathered his toys into groups and went through them all with him. One group at a time, I would tell him how many he could keep of that kind and then asked him which ones he wanted to donate.

I don't know if I presented it in a way that he liked or if he has just matured a lot since the last time we tried this - but he had no problem picking out toys to get rid of. He really surprised me not only by getting rid of such a large number of toys but also by choosing some toys that I never would have thought he would part with.

Now that the shelves aren't as full, it is a lot easier for him to keep his room clean. The way things were before, it was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle and everything had to be put away in a certain spot or it wouldn't all fit.

The tub full of dress up clothes is still a bit messy but not everything in a four-year-olds life needs to be completely organized. :)

All of his DVDs are kept in a small CD case.

I thought I would also throw this one in for those of you who haven't seen his Outer Space Bedroom before.

A few changes have been made since that post. We moved one of our futons in here to provide comfortable adult sized seating since he really likes it when we hang out in his room. The blue chair that was in here has now been painted black and sits in the living room and the red table and chairs are now in the School Room:

The large table and chairs that were in here gave us a large work space which was nice but he just isn't quite big enough and had to stand on his knees to do school work. I also love the additional pop of color.

We picked up a couple of small bookshelves from Walmart to hold his book collection...

...as well as games, coloring books, etc.

I'm really happy with how clean and organized these areas are now. I'm also so proud of my little boy and how much work he put into going through his toys. Now that there is more space on his toy shelves, he has also gotten a lot better about keeping his room clean and putting toys away before getting something new out!

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