We just finished organizing my daughter’s new bedroom after switching her to a “big girl bed” and the hardest part about kid’s rooms is toy organization. The number of toys to sort and organize can be a little overwhelming.
While we don’t think kids should have too many toys, grandparents love to spoil their grandchildren. We tend to have a new toy show up at our house every time a grandparent visit happens. So, we try to cycle out the old toys to allow the new toys to take their place.
My favorite toys are single use toys. These can include bubbles, chalk, crayons, coloring books, Play Doh, etc. Once these toys have been used up, you can simply throw them away.
We also love to do a toy rotation for the toys to each season. Summer toys we try to store in storage containers in the basement or the shed in the winter, and winter toys, we do the same in the summer. Even though this works great, this still leaves plenty of year-round toys forming large piles in our living room and the children’s rooms.
Instead of hiring a professional organizer, I decided to tackle my kids' toys and find a great idea to organize them to get rid of the toy clutter.
These are some of the best toy storage ideas for your child's toys in the main family room and in your kid's bedroom.
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.
1. How we originally organized the toys
We tried the toy box first. It worked while our daughter was young, but as the number of toys grew and she started to accumulate smaller toys, the toy box just became a large vessel of lost and broken tiny toys. Our daughter would practically empty out the toy box looking for one specific toy. The bottom of the toy box was already broken and would get disgusting with missing pieces, old food, sippy cups, plates and spoons, and other items that did not belong in there.
The second idea was plastic clear bins with drawers. These kept the toys more organized and was much easier to clean. The problem with the plastic bins were the ease of opening the drawers. Our daughter would fight to get the drawers open, which is a struggle for younger children. If we set anything on top of the bins, the top would sink down and make the drawers nearly impossible for her to open on her own. Another issue was even though this worked great for the small toys, the larger toys and board games could not fit in the drawers.
At the end of the day, this had to change!
2. How we sorted the toys
The first step to organizing kids toys, is to form 4 separate piles to sort them into:
1. Keep
2. Sell
3. Donate
4. Throw Away
I’m sure you have heard of this method a million times and have used it all over your house, but it is the best way for sorting toys for young children.
Once you have organized all the toys, sort the keep pile into categories.
Depending on what your children like to play with, this great option will help you decide how to organize their toys by the type of toy.
Our categories included:
1. Crayons and Coloring Books
2. Board Games
3. Horses and Ponies
4. Paw Patrol Cars
5. Small Toy Cars and Hot Wheels Cars
6. Doctor
7. Barbies / Action Figures
8. Electronics
9. Stuffed Animals
10. Puzzles
11. Craft Supplies / Art Supplies
12. Everything Else
These categories are how we organized the storage bins (more on that in a bit).
3. The new way of organizing the toys
After a lot of research and looking at our living space, I came up with storage solutions … cube organizers.
I know what you’re thinking, those little flimsy open bins are not going to stay clean or keep my kid’s toys organized.
I thought this exact same thing while doing my research to organize our own toys.
Well, my husband and I decided to try the cube organizer in the play area in our living room to see how it would look. I was sick of looking at toy boxes and cheap ugly bins that made my living room look like a playroom.
I found this beautiful Cube Organizer at Amazon in black to store items and it goes with my living room décor. It fits perfect in the storage space and would look great in any small living spaces.
I could have gone with black bins or maroon to go with my curtains, but I decided to go with pink and blue. I rotated the colors and it's a great way to help my children identify which box contains which items.
It's an easy way for my daughter to know which pink bin contains her horses and which blue bin contains her play kitchen.
These awesome Cube Organizer Bins were from Amazon as well and go very well in our living room.
After living with our new Cube Organizer for a few months and testing out the idea with our daughter, we realized this simple idea was the perfect way to keep her toys organized.
I was still pregnant with our son at the time, so it was the perfect time to teach our then 2-year-old how to keep her toys organized by bin and put them back into the correct bin after she was done during cleanup time.
This idea worked out perfect for our daughter and would be great for younger kids and older kids!
She is allowed to pull a bin off the shelf by herself and dump the toys out on the floor. When she is done playing with those toys, she knows how to put the toys back in the bin and we put the bin back on the shelf before she can dump out another bin. This of course took some practice, but now it is something she is used to and is not such a daunting task.
4. How we organized our daughter’s bedroom
So, back to our daughter’s new room. We needed to organize her toys in easiest way in her bedroom since she was going to be upgrading to a big girl room complete with a full-sized bed.
Since her brother is now mobile and puts everything in his mouth, she knows she cannot dump bins out on the floor in the living room that contain small items. Any toys with small pieces have moved into her bedroom.
I started my research back up on what to get her to organize her toys in her bedroom and I knew I had to get a Cube Organizer. I wanted her bedroom organization system to have open shelves to keep the toys in plain sight and at eye level for her, and to use slightly smaller bins than the ones in the living room.
I ended up finding this perfect Cube Organizer from Amazon that matches her bedroom furniture and can be laid on its side. It comes with an anchor kit, which was important to us as well. This cube organizer is slightly smaller than the one in the living room so it would work great in small spaces, but also has the open shelving we're looking for.
The bins needed to be fun colors since her new bedroom was going to be a My Little Pony Rainbow bedroom. I decided on a rainbow wall for her toys and found these awesome rainbow Cube Organizer Bins from Amazon that fit perfectly in the Cube Organizer.
The stuffed animals were a whole different issue because they do not fit into cubes very well and she always needs easy access to them.
My mom bought our daughter this awesome Monkey Chair off of Amazon that she can put stuffed animals in and use it as a bean bag chair without the beans. I thought this was a good idea. It gives her a great place to sit in to play or read and a place to store some of her stuffed animals that she does not play with every day.
She needed a place to store her favorite stuffed animals that she plays with regularly and we didn’t want her to have to dig inside the Monkey Chair every day. I remembered back to my childhood and how I had a Stuffed Animal Toy Hammock my parents had hung on my bedroom wall. They still make these awesome Stuffed Animal Hammocks, and you can find them on Amazon. They could also compliment higher shelves to store items or display decorations and I have found it causes less mess on the floor of your child's bedroom.
We were able to get her My Little Pony Rainbow Bedroom finished in 3 days and our now 3-year-old tells us every single day about how much she loves her new bedroom.
Whether you need to organize your living room or your kid's bedrooms, these storage ideas can work great to keep their toys organize and help decrease the clutter.
How do you organize your children’s toys?
Feel free to share in the comments below!
