If you’ve been following for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of toy rotation. Not only does it help to remove the overwhelming toy clutter from your home, it encourages independent, creative play too! I could talk about the benefits all day!
However, one of the most common road blocks people face when they want to get started with toy rotation is the storage. Where do I store all of the extra toys!? Well today I’m going to share some ideas to help you with this!
A Peek at Our Storage
For those that don’t know already, we have a play room set up in our master bedroom. It’s a combined office and play space for our little learners. We are very fortunate to have this space so we actually use the walk in wardrobe to store all of our extra toys, supplies and resources.
It works so beautifully for us but I do understand that most sane people aren’t going to give up their master bedroom for a play room! But if there’s one thing I want you to take from this post, it’s that the space has to work for you and that you’ll probably experiment with different systems for a while until you find something that works for you and your family.
Inside our walk in wardrobe, I use Kallax cubes from IKEA with Drona boxes inside to store and sort all of our toys. We also have some Billy Bookcases along the other walls to store things like puzzles, board games and art and craft supplies.
Having a dedicated space for every single toy in your home is really important. If you don’t have enough space to store all of the toys in one central location (or a few central locations if you have a smaller home), then you probably need to declutter and rehome some things until you do have space.
Sort Toys into Categories
Chelsea from Chelsea Lane shared these gorgeous photos of how she sorts and organises her art and craft supplies into plastic tubs. She’s using my Play Room labels (available to download here) to help sort her resources.
This makes it really easy for her to find what she needs when it’s time to do art or craft with her little learners. You might like to sort your toys into large plastic crates or tubs based on categories like blocks, dolls and animals.
Before we moved into the master bedroom, I had all of our toys sorted into large plastic tubs stored in the spare bedroom. This worked really well until we outgrew that smaller bedroom as a play space.
I’ve also sorted our animal figurines into containers based on their theme. This works well for us because we have quite the selection of animals after collecting them for many years. These are just cheap $4 containers from Kmart and then we just stack them in the cupboard. It makes it really quick to find what we need when we’re setting up a small world.
Nooks in Your Home
If you’re limited on space, try adding some of your toys to crates in other nooks of your home. Sometimes you might have some shelves in an office or other room of the house where you can add some toy storage. The garage or linen cupboard are popular choices for storing the extra toys.
You might even add a few crates to your play space and use labels to organise the toys into categories like Chelsea has below. This will make pack up time much easier for your little learners too!
I hope this post has given you some ideas when it comes to storing toys that are out of rotation. There’s no right or wrong to do it – it’s all about experimenting with different storage options and then making adjustments to suit you and your family.
If you’d like more support around getting started with toy rotation and learning how to create purposeful play spaces, click the button below!
Great post. Where is the shelf that's beside the ikea cubes from?
Hey Rita – I’m guessing you mean next to the IKEA Trofast in the first image? The open bookshelves are from Educating Kids =)