Everything I need to know, I didn't get from the playroom.
For this post, I'm just gonna go with some of my helpful hints. These are ideas that I have picked up from my own experience with children, and from my experience of organizing kids' rooms and playrooms for my family and friends.

Books:
Bookcases are a fabulous thing.....until the kids get to them.
This bookcase was in the kids' closet in their bedroom. They had a separate playroom for their toys. I suggested the books be taken out of the bedroom and moved into the playroom. This solved a couple of problems: bedrooms stay cleaner if they are used solely for the purpose of sleeping; and it's a lot easier for Mom to get to the bookshelf and clean it when she's cleaning the rest of the playroom.

It's important to organize the books and make them look nice. This will not necessarily motivate the kids to keep it looking nice, but it will definitely be a motivation for you. In this case we put board books on the bottom for her youngest to get to, and all of the oversized books went in the bookcase on their sides.

Toy boxes:
The problem with toy boxes is that inevitably the bottom fills up with small pieces and parts. The kids no longer play with the toys in the toy box, because they cannot see them, or get to them without emptying the whole thing. I suggested that we move the miscellaneous toys to the cute tote organizers the homeowner already possessed. Then we put all of the stuffed animals in the toy box. No small parts or pieces to get lost in the bottom of the box, and no more trying to find room for the billions of stuffed animals that kids “have” to keep.

Other tidbits of random kid-related organizing knowledge:

*Put things on the top. If you don't put something on the top of a chest of drawers or a bookshelf, or a toy box; kids will put lots of somethings up there for you.

*Don't forget the corners. If you place perpendicular furniture together and leave an empty triangle in the corner of a room, you have created a hidey-hole. This is where you need to look for lost remotes, missing socks, and any other item you haven't been able to find.

*Go through the old clothes. Keep what you will pass down. Then give the rest away to bless the lives of others. Old, purposeless clothes in the tops of your closet are not heirlooms, they are clutter, and missed opportunities to help someone less fortunate.

Link To Full Post

Tweet Article

1 Comment

One of the hardest parts about organizing is maintenance. We all get lazy sometimes. Even with a place for everything, sometimes you just don't feel like putting things where they go.

This is one of the biggest reasons that I make a distinction between dirty and cluttered. A lot of us have clean albeit cluttered homes. My kids' rooms have the opposite problem.....they are fully organized, but they just won't stay clean.

After helping my friend organize and rearrange her daughter's room, I decided that one way get my kids to clean their room was to redecorate. We usually rearrange the rooms every January. We like to try new furniture placement, and reevaluate whether our systems are working or not, and sometimes even change the function of a room. But being out of school for summer, and getting ready to go back, we really needed good motivation to clean the rooms. And when you involve a little kid in the rearrangement of their room, they feel so empowered and creative (and will actually help).

The view from the doorway before. This is one of the reasons I decided it was time to redecorate. How would you like to walk by this everyday?

The view from the doorway after. The bow organizer got moved from the pink wall. This is one of those placement reevaluations. I thought the bow organizer would make a very cute design element on the wall. In reality, the kids kept knocking it off the wall. They never put the bows back on it so there was always a pile of bows on the floor in front of it. Solution: off the wall and on the floor.

The view of the side of the bed before. When I bought and refinished this side table, I made my daughter promise to keep it nice. It usually gets cleaned off, but this small walkway usually gets trashed. I figured it was because there was no reason to keep the bed made or beside the bed clean. I had never bought my kids a comforter when I moved them to a queen size bed (used to be a guest room bed), they were just using an old quilt.

Side of the bed after. Solution: I bought a new comforter and made a big deal about it. We went to several stores searching for the cutest (and cheapest) one. Then I made a small change of switching the way the bed faced. Now it takes up less room so there's more room to play on the floor. Also it looks like a giant day bed. With the pillows at the top, I can fold back the comforter instead of trying to shove it between the bed and wall. The girls thought this made their bed look really cool. I also put one of their buckets beside the bed for all their blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals that they like to keep on their bed.

(side note: my oldest girl picked out the saying on the wall. She had vinyl on her wall before but it was white and didn't really show up. This is sparkly black and I thought her saying was very cute and creative.)

Corner view before. One problem I noticed was that the girls' room was "visually cluttered". I use this terminology all the time when I'm organizing for others.....and all I'm really trying to explain is that when there is too much for the eye to look at all at once, it gives the area a feel of being cluttered even if it is not.

Corner view after. Even though I was the one to paint all the crazy murals before, I still had to talk the girls into letting me paint over them. We left some on the opposite wall, and moved a picture from the opposite wall to fill the blank space. My oldest daughter loves busy, bright, brash things....but even she agreed that this just looked better.

Hopefully, seeing that the plumber's toilet gets clogged too (so to speak) will help motivate you to tackle your own spaces. And if you want to involve your kids, or just give yourself extra incentive, remember that the cleaning and organizing is secondary to the fun of redecorating.

Link To Full Post

Tweet Article

5 Comments