Clever Ways to Organize Your Kid’s Toys

I don’t know about all of you, but I still haven’t completely dug out after the holidays.  

It’s not a task for the faint of heart, y’all.  

I am an organized person at heart, and I like my house to reflect that.  I want everything in my house to have it’s own home, or a place where it belongs.  As such, when new things come into the house, I often have to rearrange, or reorganize, a bit, in order to find them a home.  

I have two small children, which amplifies the need for reorganization 100-fold.  Their wants and needs are constantly changing, and therefore, my house is constantly changing.  It’s particularly bad after gift giving holidays, such as Christmas and birthdays, when we have an influx of new things that need to find a place within the house before driving me insane.  

Unfortunately, we don’t have a dedicated play room in our house.  When upstairs, my kids play mainly in their bedrooms, and when downstairs, the main living room is where they play.  As I already stated, I like things to be organized.  I also don’t want people to think that my favorite style of decor is colorful plastic.  So, I have come up with some clever ways to organize (and hide!) my kid’s toys throughout my house.

(There are no affiliate links in this post.  I just really like what I’ve included links for.)

1) Cube storage

When my daughter was little, I purchased this cube storage piece from Wayfair to help organize the toys in the living room.  (The baskets came from Target.)

I love this piece, and it’s been one of the best purchases I’ve made for toy organization.  It’s easy for the kids to access and use – even my 16-month old can pull the lower three baskets out, in order to get to the toys.  The cubbies work well for larger items – like the large Mr. Potato Head and the Sesame Street house – and I’m able to hide a lot of the smaller toys away in the baskets at the end of the day.  

I’ve made this whole wall into their little area, complete with a vintage school desk, and this framed piece that I made to display their artwork.  (You can also see some artwork hanging on the wall in the background…  My daughter loves to “decorate,” too.)

2) Enclosed cabinet

When my second child came along, the toy population in my house exploded.  Despite my best efforts at keeping the toys thinned out, I still needed just a little extra storage in my living room.  I found this little cabinet at an estate sale for $10 and knew it was just what I needed. 

(Click here to see what it looked like when I bought it and to get the scoop on how I made it over.)

I absolutely love this piece.  It gives me the extra toy storage I need, and it completely hides them away when needed.  Plus, it fits with the decor in my living room, and simply looks like another piece of furniture.  Win-win!  It also provides super easy access to the toys for the kids.

3) Trofast storage from Ikea

A couple of years ago, my daughter really got into duplo blocks.  My mom found a huge bin of duplos for sale on craigslist and bought them for us.  I wanted to find a way to store them all that would 1) keep them somewhat organized, and 2) be easy for my daughter to access.

While scrolling through Ikea’s website, I came across the Trofast storage units.  It was exactly what I was looking for, and it has worked out wonderfully for storing all of our blocks.  This is the one I bought.

It is located in a closet (out of sight and out of the way – yay!) just off of our main living room.  As with everything else, this is easy for my daughter to get to and use.  She can pull the bins out of the unit by herself, and it makes clean-up super simple. 

4)  Utilizing closet space

I am big on utilizing closet space for toy storage.  My daughter has a large walk-in closet in her bedroom, and I have taken full advantage of that space.  She has both a toy box and her toy kitchen in there.  

This is another storage solution that I love.  It helps keep the toys out of sight and mostly contained, yet it’s totally accessible for her and right there in her own bedroom.

Even if you don’t have a large walk-in closet, you can still utilize the space.  My son’s room does not have a walk-in closet, but instead, bi-fold doors, and I am still able to put a toy box in there.  

5) Stuffed animal zoo

Oh, the stuffed animals.  They seem to multiple at a faster rate than any other type of toy.  Why is that?  Pretty sure it was the same when I was a kid.  So, I built a zoo for the stuffed animals.  You can see how I did it here.  

The kids absolutely love this thing, and so do I.  It’s easy for them to pull animals out, (as well as climb into the thing themselves – ha!), and it is just as easy for me to toss them (the animals, that is) back in when they are done.

6) Beanie baby rack

Here is yet another stuffed animal solution.  The stuffed animal zoo lives in my son’s room, but my daughter adores stuffed animals and wants many of them to “live” in her room.  She had collected so many that she insisted on keeping in her room that I needed to come up with some way to organize them in her room.

Enter the beanie baby torture rack, as my husband jokingly calls it.  Did any of you have one of these?  They were popular back when beanie babies were all the rage.  (Am I totally dating myself there?  Yes.  Yes, I am.)  Like so many others, I collected beanie babies and hung them on this rack for display.  Even after I had moved on from the beanie baby obsession, I hung onto everything, thinking I may want it all for my kids someday.  (This is the closest thing I could find to it.)

Over the past few years, I have come so. close. to getting rid of this rack so many times because I didn’t think I would ever use it.  Recently, though, when mulling over what I could do for stuffed animal storage in my daughter’s room, I thought about this torture device rack and pulled it out of the attic.

It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing solution, but it definitely helps keep the animals contained.  Plus, it’s fairly small and easy to stick into a corner.  The smaller animals have been hung by a cloth covered rubber band, and the larger ones are hung with a clothespin.

So, there you have it.  These are some of the ways that I help keep the chaos organized around my house.  Hopefully, it’s given you some ideas to help around your own house.