Over the last few days I have been working on one of the projects I mentioned in this post. We have a playroom filled with toys. Rarely is there a time when you  enter the room and don’t trip over one of our 3 kid’s “projects” and while on penalty of death my children have been known to make the room look almost clean, the lack of order and structure created means that the random buckets the toys get tossed into will require trashing the room fully to find the errant crucial piece to a puzzle I spent a day with a friend sorting through those months earlier. Needless to say, this has not been a very successful operation for quite some time.

Awhile ago I came across a toy organizational system that seemed like a really cool idea, albeit a tad bit complicated, but complicated is where I live. If you want to know more about the toy library check out want what you have.

I started out with the toy library goal in mind and as is often always the case with me, I discovered halfway through the process that I do not possess the necessary materials/tools to make it work. Given that realization, I opted instead for a simply more organized playroom. It took a friend and I two full days to bring it together.

This is the playroom in progress.

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Using the omelet argument, the first step, after assessing the damage, was to break every egg within reach. We started by emptying one small container at a time and then quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. So we dumped many out at once and started the process of sifting through the piles.

The middle of the room shown above was filled with baby toys that my 3, almost 7 and almost 10 year old kids no longer needed. Yes we are a bit late in getting rid of them, but in my defense, having had our 2 boys first, it’s been slow going in getting our little girl enough things that were “hers”, without cooping the boys toys and we wanted her to have enough things to play with.

After clearing out the baby toys, we then went about the task of finding a dedicated container for each of the categories of toys remaining. This same friend had helped me organize this playroom years ago and as a result we still had lots of pretty cartoon images for most of the containers as well as a labeling system I’d used prior to her involvement. We had containers labeled Music, Blocks, Cars and Trucks, Legos, and a few drawers labeled for our two train sets. We also had containers labeled Animals, People, NOT People (for humanoid like things-robots monsters-stupid little fast food toys that can’t be put in the other two categories) and of course Random Little Things (for the things that can’t fit into any category).

Having 5 kids (my 3 and her 2) pretty much constantly interrupting us took quite a bit of our time and productivity, but I think we did a pretty decent job our first day.

The end of Day 1

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Day 2 will post tomorrow.