Toy Storage

Over the past week or more I’ve been feeling increasing frustration with the state of my home. I’ve been so busy making sure kids get to school and homework gets done and people get fed, that I have been losing the battle with entropy in my house. A huge part of the problem is that I haven’t been making the kids do housework. Making kids clean is always an uphill battle. I keep looking at that particular hill and deciding that where I’m sitting is alright. Except where I was sitting was starting to get knee deep in stuff.

So this week I’ve enforced the “Jail Box” more than once. Early this week I informed the kids that in 20 minutes anything left on the family room floor would be going to jail. They scrambled and picked everything up. Yay, I’d succeeded. But by the afternoon of the next day all the toys were back on the floor because they’d “picked up” by shoving everything onto the fireplace or into the toy box. The little toy shelf I bought when Link was a baby simply wasn’t an adequate storage solution for 4 kids worth of toys.

I stared at the family room and the jumble of toys for several days. I went and priced shelving at Home Depot and realized it was $200+ that I simply didn’t have lying around. I came back home and stared at the mess some more. I talked to Howard to evaluate whether maybe spending $200 might be worth it after all. He wasn’t sure it was the right solution. I stared at the mess a little more and was starting to feel like it was time to just get rid of all the toys. Fortunately that rash move was averted when Howard went out on an errand. He called me from our cell phone to let me know that a neighbor was having a garage sale and she had a dresser that might work for toy storage. I imediately tossed Gleek and Patches into the stroller and went to check it out. She had a dresser and a matching corner cabinet. They were not beautiful, but they were sturdy, they would fit, and they would store toys. My wonderful neighbor sold them to me for $50 and then helped me move them into my house.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon sorting through the jumble of toys. I threw away broken bits, put legos back in the lego bucket, put knex back in the knex boxes, threw all the balls into a bag in a drawer, found that the huge bottom drawer was perfect for all of Patches big trucks, located all the little people and their accessories, put 30 or more hair bands back in the bathroom, took a pile of pencils to the kitchen, took a pile of books to the bookshelf, threw bread crusts away, threw away bits of games that we got rid of ages ago because we couldn’t find all the bits, and various other sorting tasks. (In case anyone was wondering a big toybox is about the worst possible toy storage solution because when kids are cleaning they throw EVERYTHING into the toybox in a frantic effort to get it all out of sight as quickly as possible. Small toyboxes with specific labelled purposes are much better, though not childproof. Small boxes tend to get carried off and used as boats or houses, then the box is missing at clean up time. But small boxes are definitely better than the Giant Toybox of DOOM.) When I was done with the sorting and relocating, my family room was clean. I can actually see my fireplace for the first time in years. Not only that, but things are sorted so that when I say “Clean the family room” I can also say “If I can still see toys you’re not done yet.” Best of all, the dresser and cupboard are not even full. I no longer fear Christmas because I now have places to put the coming influx of stuff.

I still intend to sort through the rest of my house and thin out the surplus. I’d like all of my house to have the same spacious feeling that my family room just acquired. Mostly I’m just grateful that the solution arrived just when I really needed it.