Organizing the playroom was one crucial step in reclaiming part of our basement for my own use, and yes, reclaiming my very sanity as toys were taking over the entire house. Besides my own three little hooligans, I have a young niece and nephew who visit often, especially when school is out, and when the gang gets together they have a rip-roaring good time... at the expense of my personal possessions sometimes (fond memories of a Wii remote cracking the big screen TV, just like that commercial). They have always managed to leave the basement in total chaos.
We had given the kids a large playroom in the main part of our mostly-finished basement. We installed nice white built-in shelves and cabinets, including their own entertainment center. There was plenty of room for romping and burning off extra energy. And, I thought, it would be easy for them to put their toys away when they were done playing.
The result was a complete disaster area that I was embarrassed for even the exterminator to see (I imagine him saying, duh lady clean your house if you want to get rid of pests). Kids (and the dog) all ran wild in there, letting popsicles melt in gooey puddles you didn't find for weeks, mingled with spilled chocolate milk buried under a layer of scattered blocks, puzzle pieces, chewed up stuffed animals, story books, broken crayons, and electronic games...and much much more.
I have learned a few things since my first playroom attempt. This past weekend the playroom was moved into a smaller, more enclosed space in the basement. The big room with the TV in it is now my deluxe exercise room (including a punching bag - much needed). The kids can still run around and blow off steam in the big room but they are not allowed to leave toys in there.
The new, organized playroom in a smaller space:
If you are looking into how to organize your kids' playroom, here are a few suggestions from hard-learned experience:
- Playroom organization begins with purging. You have to get the kids out of the house for this one, trust me, you don't want them "helping" you decide what to keep. That said, before you do this take note of what your kids are currently enjoying playing with, and also remember things they used to love playing with until they lost all the pieces. You want to get rid of clutter and excess, but there is no need to get rid of honestly fun toys they like if they're still in good shape. Things to trash: kids meal toys, broken toys, puzzles with missing pieces, toys the dog chewed up.
- A bigger playroom is not better. The more space there is to scatter things, the more mixed up everything will get, and the harder it will be to restore order to the chaos. It will be hard for kids to find their toys, let alone enjoy playing with them.
- Use mid-sized containers for grouping toys together. Use plastic bins and baskets big enough to hold chunky toys, but not so big as to hold a LOT of toys. If the bin is too large, the kids will feel they need to dump the whole thing out to find the toy they want to play with. Too small and you won't be able to group enough things together, you'll just have a clutter of bins.
- Label your bins in a child-friendly way. Use big lettering as well as pictures to show what belongs in the bin. I was not a perfectionist about the pictures. I just found photos online (Amazon was useful for this) of things that were representative of the toys I was storing. I put the labels inside plastic sheet protectors or just covered them with tape and slapped them onto the containers directly.
- Be creative in grouping toys together. There are obvious things, like Duplos, or wooden blocks that obviously go together with their own kind. But what about a bin full of everything Elmo, or a collection of anything that could be called a small animal? Give things their own special group to belong to and it will help kids remember where to put it back. Here were my catergories:
Duplos
Mega Bloks
Thomas the Tank Engine
Magnet Toys
Balls
Trucks/Cars (also included some flying vehicles)
Star Wars Action Figures
Costumes (big bin also doubles as a table with four small chairs around)
Dora Toys
Wooden Blocks
Mr. Potato Head
Other Action Figures
Doll Clothes
Barbie
Toddler Toys
Dolls
Stuffies (stuffed animals)
Kitchen Dishes
Kitchen Food (toy food that is)
Nerf Laser Gun and Darts
Penguins and Puffles
Elmo Toys
Little People
Boobahs and Teletubbies
Coin Toys (a toy piggy bank and a cash register)
Trio and Castle Set
Star Wars Practice Blades (a narrow drawer for my son to keep two old vacuum cleaner crevice tools he likes to pretend are his practice lightsabers)
Baby Toys
Puppets
Peek-a-Bloks
- Avoid catch-all toy bins as much as possible. If you have a big pile of toys that don't seem to belong to any one set, comb through them once more and see if you can't find enough to form a category like "Dora Toys" or "Magnet Toys". In the end, you might end up with an amorphous group of stuff that you have to resort to calling "Toddler Toys" but keep that sort of thing to a minimum, to avoid the large bin of mystery toys problem.
- Set the rules for long-term playroom organization success. Our rules are simple:
- No food or drinks allowed in the basement (including the playroom).
- All toys need to put away when you are done with them.
- Before bed, every single toy in the whole house has to be put back in the playroom (with exceptions for stuffies to sleep with, and my son's Lego collection which lives in his room).
This weekend we couldn't keep the kids away for ever... when the purging was done, they were around for the organizational part, and they really wanted to help. They enjoyed taping the signs onto the bins and putting items in their new homes. Today the cousins came over and once again threw toys all over the room (much to my kids' dismay!), but they had been forewarned that they were expected to put things away in the places as I had labeled them. And lo and behold, before their mom came to get them, they had everything put back as if they had never been there.
And yes, it is more fun for the kids to play in an organized playroom, especially for my 2.5 year old who thinks it's like Christmas, all these "new" toys to play with. I'll have to keep reminding them all to clean up after themselves, but kids like knowing what's expected of them. They didn't want to have a messy playroom before, they just didn't know how to handle it. Now they have an easy-to-understand system of organization to help them quickly put toys where they are supposed to go.
Maybe I won't need that punching bag quite so badly as I did before.
We are trying something to get rid of the weeds somewhat naturally. The idea is, after clearing by hand and trimming down to the dirt, to cover the area with cardboard and then pile up the remaining summer grass clippings and the fall grass and leaves on top of the cardboard. The cardboard will block most light from reaching the weed-bed, and the trimmings, clippings, mulched leaves, etc will break down the cardboard over the course of the winter. When spring comes, we'll be able to add some topsoil and plant the grass seed. It will be a good, fertile bed, without many weeds to compete with, and should result in a nice, new grassy area next to our home. 
