Anna's Playroom

A few weeks ago I helped my friend Anna to tidy up her playroom. It was my first job as a professional organiser (although I wasn't charging her as I need to gain experience).

Anna's issue was that she had a toy room (used to be a dining room) which was just completely overloaded. There were too many toys. Some toys that were not appropriate for her sons' ages, some were rubbish (broken toys, papers and artwork that was not worth keeping), and many duplicates of the same thing. Here are the before pictures:

I took with me several large plastic boxes, black bin liners, post it notes and a marker pen.

We started by clearing the area by the window of toys one by one and deciding which of the following categories it was:

1. Keep
2. Bin
3. Sell
4. Donate

In the space of 2 hours, we filled up an entire bin bag of rubbish, 3 boxes of stuff to sell and a few items that were not worth selling (my kids are currently making use of them at the moment).

Once we'd finished with the corner by the window, we also tackled the cupboard to the left of the door.

Here are the after photos:

This is all the stuff I took away to sell on Anna's behalf. So far I have made over £36 - £7 commission for me (20% I'm charging this time), and over £28 for Anna. I am tracking all the items and sales in a spreadsheet (of course) ;) .

There are some areas that we didn't quite get to in the 2 hours we had spare (I also had my 20 month old daughter with me "helping") so I do plan on going back at some point (as soon as other commitments, namely my Java course, are over). We didn't have time to tackle the table area or the bookshelf above it (or the lower bookshelve corner either):

If you would like me to come and help you declutter a room, cupboard, area (no job too big or small), let me know. Lets look at the before and after photos again:

BEFORE

AFTER

Medicine box for the kids

I remembered to take a BEFORE photo for this one. Yay!


As you can see, all a bit shoved together. Its good that I can see what's in there but I don't like that I had to take everything out in order to get to anything that was at the bottom:

First, I emptied everything out of the bag, threw away anything that we didn't use anymore, relocated anything that wasn't really for the children or didn't belong here. Then I worked out, by looking at what I had, what kind and size of container(s) I needed. I found this box, and the small ones inside. I did this about a month ago and its STILL tidy. So it just goes to show that it works (even though it does take up a little more space than before):

Maybe my next thing should be to decorate the box - maybe with some red and white paper.....

Toy storage

I'm not being paid to say this, honest, but Ikea is the BEST for storage solutions. 


The kids toys were previously being stored in a large chest box that my parents gave us. Its beautiful. They painted it and decorated it with a lovely picture. See below:

Obviously, there was no chance of us getting rid of this as its such a beautiful box and keepsake so its gone in Joshua's bedroom. 


At the time, this is what I had wanted for the sitting room. I thought it would work well as its a box (we could just chuck everything in at the end of the day) and we could use it as a coffee table too when we had guests. Unfortunately as JJ got older, it became harder and harder to keep it organised. The type of toys a one year old has are quite different to what a 3 year old has - lots of smaller things, small cars which always fell to the bottom of the box and we had to dig through to find his favourite little Lightening McQueen car. And then when his little sister came along it became even harder to manage. 


This is what it would look like after organising it:

But it would never stay that way for long. 


One day we decided to bite the bullet and go to Ikea to get something that would be easier to keep organised!


This is what we got:

This is how we organised all the drawers:

And we got this for top (it doesn't look like this now as it seems to have become a bit of a dumping ground for stuff. Will have to sort that out at some point!!!

I think I might make labels for the drawers although we haven't really needed them to keep it organised. Its pretty much still as organised as the day we put it all together - although we did move some of them around - so that the drawer with the fruit is at the bottom so Lala can get to them. It works so much better. 

We also got a bigger TV around the same time that goes up on the wall and gives us a lot more space so overall the effect is much better. The only thing the toy storage DOESN'T do is pick up all the toys at the end of the day. I still have to do that myself sadly!