I know I'm not the only one who gets a little anxious about toy and book storage post-Christmas. Despite living in a small space, we are blessed with great built-in wardrobes here. I had happily been using the wardrobes for toy storage (as well as clothes). We had a low bookcase in Mr 2's bedroom where all our childrens' books were housed.
But Miss 1 now knows how to pull herself up. She now knows how to pull everything off any shelf she can reach. Our books were constantly all over the floor. Then they were stepped on, slipped on or ripped. As a stop-gap measure, pre-Christmas, I pulled most of the books off the low bookcase in Mr 2's room. The bookcase was left housing only teddies and the few books I left out. It looked pretty sad, empty and messy...
I crammed most of the books into Mr 2's wardrobe (along with his clothes and the toy boxes already in there). We added extra books and extra toys to the wardrobe after Christmas. The wardrobe started to look pretty crowded and pretty messy...
A solution was needed. This was a job for... the IKEA Expedit bookcase. I dragged my poor husband to IKEA the first opportunity we got (late Saturday afternoon). After dinner, we put Mr 2 to sleep in our bed and spent an hour constructing the bookcase on the floor (it took up most of Mr 2's floor area), then another hour working out how to manoeuvre the bookcase into an upright position and attach it to the wall without destroying anything. That thing weighs over 90kg.
Although the construction and safety measures took us to 9:30pm, I had to start loading up the shelves. Not being one to do a re-organisation by halves, I decided to re-organise all the toys and kids' books in our house.
The first step was to amalgamate all of our books and toys. The second step was to realise that I would not fit EVERYTHING into this bookcase, however wonderful and however huge it might be.
Puzzles, card games and board games stayed in our lounge room cupboards. A few soft toys and dolls (+ the doll bassinet and cot) stayed in the girls' room. We already keep basic drawing materials and colouring books in a sideboard in the lounge room, and our messy art supplies are in the garage. But, apart from that, everything is now in or on this bookcase. So exciting.
Miss 3 helped me make some basket labels on Sunday afternoon. I drew the labels onto white paper, stuck them onto heavy cardboard (from the Expedit packaging), got Miss 3 to colour them in (I did a couple too) and covered them with clear contact. To attach them to the baskets, we punched a hole in one end and tied the label to the basket handle with ribbon. (Miss 3 can decipher the drawings!)
I'm not naive enough to believe that the shelves will always look this neat, but I think the cube system is great for keeping everything in the right spot.
How do you organise your kids' toys and books? Have you done a post-Christmas re-organise?
P.S. This is my own opinion, not a sponsored post. But if anyone from IKEA is reading, I will blog for IKEA products.
