I’m trying to decide on a place to store my daughter’s toys in the living room, without using a big, bold, clunky, plastic toy box. Since we don’t have a playroom, all of her things are piled in a pack 'n play right now. I’d like to get something that looks a bit nicer and goes with the decor of the living room. Maybe a trunk or storage bench. What do you guys use for toy storage?
How about books? Do you keep them on a standard bookshelf or in another place?
And while we’re on the topic of storage, how about the learning materials that you have (flash cards, etc.)… do you use any special organization for them? Where do you keep it?
We try to keep most of my sons toys in his room. For the toys that are down in the family room a good option is a low wooden shelve that matches the decor of your living room with maybe 2-3 shelves. Then you just have a handful of toys downstairs at a time and it is easy to keep them organized on the shelves and they are easily accessible to your child (they can even put them away by themselves), you can then rotate those toys to keep them fresh. Another option is to go to World Market (or a similar store) and buy a large woven basket with or without a lid to put them in then you can have more toys and they are out of site but they are not as organized. For the learning materials we have a large file drawer on the floor of my sons closet and it has 10 dividers for the 10 divisions of knowledge in Domans books and within each division manilla folders for each group. It also has a 11th divider for words. The reason the drawer is on the floor of his closet if the materials are so large that if the drawer was in the cabinet where it belongs it wouldn’t shut so this keeps them organized and accessible.
linzy, thanks for the suggestions and ideas. I like the idea of a woven basket, and I’ve been looking for awhile now. I’m glad you mentioned World Market, because I wouldn’t have even thought to look there before, but I did now and I found something that might be just perfect! yay!
I have put different item in separate boxes animals ,blocks ,cars,and working items like puzzles and change them when he is finished with example animals we put them in and give him another box.then i have a big box of fridge and he has all sorts.Somtimes he take off every thing and likes to use it as a camp.
But we have two living rooms – a playroom and an “adult” living room, which makes life sooo much better for us. The playroom makes our house look like a home daycare but we don’t care–we have children and we’re not going to hide that! Here’s our playroom on Christmas morning http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y172/texaslady22/WakingupChristmasMorning6.jpg
We have lots of posters on the walls and the Bits all go on a bookshelf and in the cabinet.
I agree, texaslady, you have a nice playroom for your kid!
For storage, we put our son’s toys in this net storage we bought from ikea, which we hung low enough for him to reach so we can teach him to put his toys away. It’s quite cheap, it doesn’t take up too much space, and it’s completely washable, so it works well for us.
well i have a book shelves that i had anchored to the floor for safty reasons then i put small matching or not boxes on the lower shelves that you can esaly take the toys out of and then just toss in to, the learning stuff i would suggest a drawer or even a folder or something along that line to keep them organized. and books and such depending on like the more heavy duty ones should be where the little one can get to them the more flimsy the higher they should be so the don’t get ruined or give the little one a paper cut
