Sunday 30 September 2012

Decluttering toys

My husband has always been a bit of a minimalist at heart, whereas I am much more acquisitive and untidy.

But a couple of months ago, I realised that the volume of clutter in the house was starting to get me down. There was so much stuff and it was so disorganized that we couldn't even use anything properly.

The toys were irritating me most of all. For example, all of my son's jigsaws were mixed up in the same box. This made it impossible to do any of the jigsaws. I have now sorted all the jigsaws out into separate ziplock bags and put them in the correct boxes. It took ages, but it was worth it.

There was usually at least one train set spread out on the living room floor and nowhere to put things away properly. The big fabric toybox I bought when my son was a baby was still full of baby toys, even though my little boy is now 4 years old.

So we took the baby toys to the charity shop. We also got rid of the toybox because it was too deep to store train sets, Lego and Playmobil - the small pieces would just have got lost at the bottom.

We bought some underbed storage boxes from Argos to replace the old toybox. We chose the blue storage boxes as these go with the blue carpet in my son's room.


These storage boxes are absolutely perfect. They are the right depth to be usable without small items being impossible to find. We can tidy everything away after my son has finished playing. And the really amazing thing is that my son even helps with the tidying up and tells my husband off if things are not put in the right boxes.

So we have a tidy living room we can actually live in at long last!

6 comments:

  1. Know the feeling well - despite constant clear-outs I feel like our living room is being over run with toys all the time. We need a bigger house!

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    1. Our house feels bigger now. You can actually see the carpet!

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  2. Oh gosh, well done! We are totally overrun and every attempt (by me) to organise things seems doomed to failure at the moment :-(

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    1. Keep going. I'm so glad I did this even though it was hard work.

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  3. Arghhh this is a job I need to tackle too *buries head in sand*. You've done a great job though and inspired me a bit more.

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    Replies
    1. I spent months just feeling overwhelmed by the whole thing. Then the jigsaws irritated me so much that I sorted them out and then had the momentum to tackle other things too.

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