Reinventing the “play” Room

Our boys have an entire room in our home dedicated to “playing”…well, almost the whole thing. My desk is in a corner, but you won’t be seeing any pictures of that any time soon.

We use our “formal” dining room for this purpose, and since we aren’t exactly formal dining people, it works really well. We have this beautiful 8 top solid wood dining table that is connected to the kitchen and open to the living room so we just eat all of our meals, formal or not, there.

But somehow, over the course of the last year the playroom had become some sort of monster we never anticipated invading our lovely home. Toys were always everywhere. My “a place for everything and everything in it’s place” motto had somehow bypassed this room.

Despite my best attempts to keep it organized, it was always a mess. It was hard to clean up and I couldn’t figure out why.

And then it donned on me.

Too many freaking toys. Everywhere.

The boys had so many options that they would just tear into the whole thing, never giving a whole lot of attention to one area or another. And we JUST had a garage sale.

So, in the spirit of nesting, and with some grand inspiration from an episode of Hoarders (just the word makes my itchy…) I reinvented the room. Henry picked two things to keep out: Lego’s and his Castle. The rest (about 75% of it) got organized, boxed, and stacked neatly in the coat closet to be rotated back in when he tires of one of the others.

It’s been awesome.

He didn’t fight me a bit on it and actually enjoyed the organization process. Plus, now the room is so tidy and free of clutter it seems to have freed his mind a bit. We also were able to make room for the library books that are in constant rotation. He spends most of his time looking through those anyway!

So, here it is, the after. I really wanted to do this without spending a ton of money at The Container Store, although, I could…love that place.