Keeping a playroom tidy can feel like the tasks of Sisyphus – a relenting experience where, when you just think you’ve made it, you’re back to square one.
While I definitely find our kids’ playroom often untidy, it takes me relatively little time to get it back in decent shape. Before I took the picture above, the room was pretty messy as we’d had a play date over that day, and it only took me about 10 minutes to get it back in relative order.
Now, before I share how I organise the room and keep it tidy, let me reiterate that our playroom, by no means, is tidy all the time. When you have kids, the best way to live happily is to embrace the casual mess that will inevitably occur, but organising our room the way we have, definitely helps. Our playroom is also constantly evolving, and we already have the next project lined up. But you should never wait until you have “that shelf/desk/bed/house” that will change it all, and find ways to keep it tidy in the state it is currently in.
Disclaimer: this blog post is not in any affiliation with IKEA, we just happen to love the brand and get most of our furniture from there.
Bigger Boxes = Easier Tidying
Especially when you have smaller kids as I do, they tend to have boxier, bigger toys. While storing toys away in big boxes can lead to more clutter, for some items they are ideal because you can chuck everything in without needing to organise it.
We use the IKEA Trofast system for bigger items that go together, like blocks. The bottom three boxes contain our train set, Legos and cars of various shapes. As Finn is mainly interested in those toys, he can pull them out himself and play. The middle two boxes have soft toys, one for Lily’s and one for Finn’s. The two smaller ones at the top have sensory activities in them (chestnuts and lentils at the moment), which can be easily replaced for our IKEA Flisat table with sensory bins (see first picture in the back).
Only Display Few Toys on Surfaces
Studies show that children don’t need more than 12 toys at a time at toddler age, and that less toys engage them in more intense play. As a Montessori-shaped child, my parent style is very Montessori-inspired. I like to display some engaging activities in the Kallax system by IKEA because the big cubicles just lend themselves to it, and the shelves are quite cheap and can be used elsewhere if they have served their purpose in the playroom. The picture below shows Finn’s shelf. In the big boxes is more storage room where I store random toys, as well as toys that aren’t on display at the moment.
In the three cubicles, I have a nail bank (with wooden nails, of course), a house with differently shaped blocks to put in, and a basket with blocks and magnetic tiles for free play. In a shelf in our bedroom, there are other toys in boxes for rotation. I rotate the toys whenever I feel the kids don’t interact with them anymore, or after three to four weeks.
When you have too many toys on display, it gets overwhelming for the children AND harder to clean for you. Dusting, vacuuming and tidying away become a lot more exhausting when there are piles of toys on display to rearrange.
Prepare an Environment for the Kids to Tidy Themselves
Another reason I am a fan of big boxes is that the kids can also dump the toys in them. If you have many small boxes for toys to go, or keep them in shelves high above, it’s hard to involve the children.
But what to do with crafting utensils? You can’t just chuck them in a box, or you’ll end up searching for them among all the other things. I found a solution in a cheap IKEA plastic bathroom shelf.
The Vesken bathroom shelf costs around €10 and is easily assembled. I took only three of the four tiers, so it wouldn’t tower over the children. In the baskets, I leave the play dough tubs, the utensils, stickers, pens, etc. (as you can see, it wasn’t it’s tidiest when I took this picture, perfection is overrated :-)) This shelf is so accessible that the children can tidy up the tubs themselves, but also have access to them and can engage with crafting whenever they want. I have washable crayons for them, so nothing bad can happen, but they’re usually really good with keeping their mess at the table.
And if they don’t tidy up, it’s also easier for me to put everything back in the accessible baskets instead of having to organise it in drawers.
A Regular Clear-Out to Declutter
A kids’ playroom needs constant maintenance, there is just no beating around the bush. Every three months, I do a massive clear-out. I go through all the boxes, throw away trinkets that are cheap, broken and/or don’t mean anything to the kids (stuff from Kinder surprise eggs or Happy Meals, for example). I also clear out things that aren’t age-appropriate anymore. Then I re-organise everything back to the initial system (i.e. all the soft toys back in their box and the dress-up dresses, etc.). Whenever I do a massive clear-out, I also tend to replace the sensory bins and activities in the cubicles to make the playroom feel like a new adventure place.
Finally, we also use this opportunity to change out bigger activities. We have a cuddle tent, a Pikler triangle with slide and a rocking horse, but they can’t all be out at the same time, so we rotate those, too.
Summarising, I can say that having less and clearing out regularly to donate or gift really helps keep the playroom tidier. And when the playroom is tidy and clean, my children tend to play independently for a lot longer, so it’s definitely worth finding a system that works for your family.
#familyblog #blogger #mamablog #playroom #kidsplayroom
You might also enjoy reading these posts:
Mama Bear Tales 
Leave a comment