Toy room overhaul

About every year I have to go through all of the toys we own and decrease the volume by half.  Being the only grand-kids in both my and my husbands families until 6 months ago, our kids are SPOILED!!  Grandma and Grandpa take good care of these kiddos with many presents for each birthday and Christmas.  So I have neglected this during the year and while trying to clean and organize the rest of the house I kept tripping over toys and stepping on LEGOs.  OUCH!!  That's something I would only wish on my enemies.

So I decided it was time to find a place for everything and put everything in its place.  The pictures to the left show our starting point, it wasn't pretty. We started de-junking (is that a word??) and cleaning.  We gathered up two full bags of trash which included broken toys, candy wrappers, and papers.  We also pulled out four garbage bags full of toys and three large bins of toys that we either sold or delivered to the local Deseret Industries Thrift Store.

I have to say I think that was a new record in our toy clean up process!  No wonder we couldn't keep the toys from spreading to every room in the house.  I have never done much to organize the toy room, our toys have mostly been in clear plastic bins without lids, BUT THE TIME HAD COME, so I kept one large red bin to put the balls in, another set of stacking drawers to keep the dress-up extras in and our current train table and got rid of all the clear plastic bins.

Once we had rid ourselves of the over abundance, and I had done a basic sketch of where I wanted everything, then we had to start sorting and organizing the remainder of the toys.  I took a trip to Target where I bought an inexpensive toy sorter (that took about twenty minutes to put together), also a board with hooks already attached to it (for hanging up all the large costumes) and six large Lego building plates. I then scoured the local craigslist and  ksl classified ads online and found a train table that someone was selling for $10 (I LOVE a good deal).

We set up different corners for each genre of toy.  Trains and cars in one corner with our original train table (I got rid of three other train sets and kept only our original GeoTrax train station and the trains to go with it.)  The new toy bin went on the wall next to the train table and in its bins went all the animals, spy stuff, small and large cars, bey blades etc.  On the far wall we mounted the wall hook board and hung all the large costumes, next to it, in the stacking drawers we put small weapons, masks, belts, gloves and many other ninja accessories. In the opposite corner we put my sons drum set and the play guitars.

In the final corner I placed the newer train table.  This one needed some modifications for our Legos.  So I flipped to the backside of the boards and proceeded to use hot glue to attach the six large Lego building plates.  Once the boards were back in place on the table we rounded up all the Legos I had been stepping on and they happily found a place in three small bins that sit underneath the table.  It's awesome!  My boys have awoken early every day since we finished this project and sneaked into the basement to build their Lego city.  They LOVE Legos, and I am one happy momma again.  It's nothing fancy, but for a basement toy room it works!

What kind of toys do your kids love and have you found any unique ways of storing them?  I'd love to hear about it.