Organizing the playroom…

Well I thought since this month we were talking about playrooms it would only be fair if I showed you mine. There is absolutely nothing fancy about our playroom unless of course you count the bright yellow Big Bird paint color. My husband still hasn’t forgiven me for that one. Trust me the color is much brighter in person :)

I feel very fortunate to have this space. When the kids get rambunctious on me I have somewhere to kick send them. A lot of hockey and soccer gets played down there. Each week my middle son gets the chore of cleaning the room up but because everything has a home, it really doesn’t take him that long at all.

Before:

After:

We use our old microwave stand for the TV and DVD player. This works amazingly well as the cupboard below provides ample space for all the DVD’s and videos.

Next we have the toy cubby unit that I absolutely love. I love that even my youngest son can handle the baskets and I also love that the baskets keep the clutter hidden and contained. Labels help identify what goes where. You can read more about that here.

We keep all the balls and hockey sticks in a rubbermaid tote lined with a Bin Buddie. Very handy indeed. I reviewed the Bin Buddie awhile back over on my review site.

Here is the other side of the room. The car play mat is kept rolled up and under the futon when not in use.

The back of the playroom holds the air hockey table and craft/game table. I’m not usually a big fan of toy boxes for most things but they do work great for dress up clothes which is what we use ours for.

The fussball table and puppet theatre are also along the back wall:

Hidden behind the puppet theatre are the puppets in a basket on a small half table.

If there is one thing I can say about setting up any kind of play space is to create zones around the room to impose some limits and boundaries to the space. Having a home for everything is also key. If you want your kids to work the system you have to make it as easy as possible for them to maintain it.

Do not set them up for failure.

Things should be at their level allowing them to be able to put stuff away quickly when required. For instance the dress up clothes are popular in our house and they usually get strewn all over the room but with the toy box all they have to do is lift the lid and shove them in when it comes time to clean up. I’m happy with that. How awesome would it look though to have them hung up on some type of cute organized rack but that is just not practical and I would totally be setting them up for failure when they neglected to work “my” system.

Once you’ve got some manageable (uncluttered!) systems in place the rest is up to consistency and training and letting the kids know what is expected of them. Something I’ve done in the past to aid the kids in their tidying up is to take a picture of how the room and each zone should look when it is all cleaned up and toys put away. You can either post this on the wall or simply in a small photo album.

These are just some ideas of things I do to maintain some order in my playroom. There are so many different ways to organize a play space and I’ve only just touched on a few of them here. As always please feel free to share what is working for you or even what is not working. And let me know if you’ve got any toy related questions and I’ll try to answer them here in the comments for you.

Related posts:

Our craft and game cupboards

One of my tricks for keeping the toys under control