Kid Clean Up

I'm starting to realize that with kids it's inevitable that their rooms will evololve over time.  A room with merely a basic cribs and changing table ...

... became a big girl room. 

I thought I would be done for a while, but not quite.  Babies have a lot of "stuff" like swings, bouncers, jumparoos, etc.  I was glad to be rid of these things and to lose the changing table, but those seem to have been replaced with lots of toys.  We try to buy more books than toys but somehow they just accumulate between grandparents and holidays. 

Up until this point, we managed to store it all reasonably well in 3 places. Our basement which rarely looked like this anymore was one place.  I'll spare you the frightening reality it had become but the shelves were empty on daily basis and the contents where strewn everywhere.

We kept a few things in a basket in our living room.  Again, the basket was so full it barely fit under the table and it was typically emptied daily with the contents scattered everywhere.

This was a not-so-bad area. 

And this ...

The first thing I did was to go through the toys for a long overdue trashing of broken or useless toys and donated toys that were perfectly good but the kids had outgrown or lost interest in.  Next, I decided that it was time to put more of these things in the kids' rooms and less all over the house.  They aren't babies anymore and they like to play in their rooms.  The room above is pretty small and probably better suited to a twin sized bed, but we've got what we've got so I had to work with it and find a way to make the room flow reasonably well without constantly having to trip over things that had no home.

This is how the bedroom ended up. 

Most of what is here was in the basement and the blue bins have plenty of space to store things. The trunk is filled with dress-up clothes. These shelves aren't anything fancy, but they're inexpensive and, well, they work great for storing toys.

I can't remember where I saw this idea but these are actually planters with the liners removed and painted white.

Nothing changed on the other side of the room, but here's a view looking that way.  I just noticed that a certain someone added a Mickey embellishment to the bed.

I'm still working on rearranging the basement and Zoe's room but this has already made a huge difference.

To be continued ...