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

Organising and decluttering the toys and tidying up kitchen/craft table

On saturday I am going to be helping a friend out with her kids play room. I thought before I go and do that (my first organising job in someone else's house) I should probably have a go at my own kid's toys.

While it wasn't that long ago that we bought a new toy storage unit and re-organised everything to fit, somehow (as always happens) toys have managed to get out of control again. In addition to all the toys in the unit itself, we also now have a big box of blocks and a toy garage that they regularly play with. I decided that (in preparation for my job on saturday) it would be a good idea to have a practice run at home. I also wanted to test out on Joshua the idea of getting your kids involved in purging their toys.

I explained to him that there are too many toys to fit in the toy drawers and that we need to get rid of some (or move them to his bedroom). We started going through the toys, drawer by drawer. He agreed to throw away any broken toys (that he didn't LOVE enough to want us to fix - or that weren't fixable - or that we were NEVER going to get around to fixing). I was really impressed with him.

I don't really have a picture of what it was like before as it didn't really look that bad but there were a few things that wouldn't fit in the drawers and a few things that just seemed to "hang around".

I had also wanted to label the toy bins since we got the unit. At the time I started this my labels hadn't arrived and I wasn't sure if they would be right there so I'd drawn labels (pictures of what should go in each bin) directly onto the plastic bins. You can see what that looked like as I don't yet have labels for the top bins. I think the black labels look much nicer (bought on ebay).

This is what it looked like before (although it didn't stay that tidy and the tray/tidy thing on the top ended up just collecting clutter and became a bit of a dumping ground - I SOOOO wish I'd taken a BEFORE photo!).

 This is what it looks like after my labelling frenzy:

Because of all the things that we either chucked out or relocated to the kids' bedroom I've actually GAINED a drawer that has NOTHING in it (the blue bottom right one that has no label on it).

I moved the tray thing so that I could use the top of the toy storage unit to keep bigger toys and some of the larger cars that either wouldn't fit in the drawers or ended up having a single drawer to themselves. I quite like having these bigger toys "on display" like that. I'm also trying to get Joshua (Lala is a bit young at the moment) to get used to playing with one thing and then putting it away when he's done. The same with the craft table. He'll play with paints and then the paints will stay out and the paper will go all over the floor..... I'll get to how I reorganised that area though in a minute.

 

Now, from the top we have:

Food, Blocks (previously in a separate box in the corner of the room - I filled this bin and then bagged up what was left to give away)....

  

Little people/figures/animals

Books (previously didn't really have a place for books - not downstairs anyway)...

Tools, cars (this hasn't really changed although I did get rid of quite a few cars that were either never played with or broken)

And the bottom two bins contain:

Electronic or noisy toys (drums, laptops, piano toys etc)
Lala's toys (dolls, balls, more baby type toys).

I am very pleased with how nice my labels look. And Joshua was very excited watching me drawing the pictures. Hopefully it will help him know where to put things when he's finished playing with them. Although I have to keep reminding him not to just dump things all over the floor and then wander off and play with something else!

Sometimes I think that even if your house is generally a mess, you have to ignore the day to day mess and do something that you have been meaning to do for ages. I tried all day to get the kitchen under control but I couldn't concentrate. I think my brain needed to feel that I was achieving something that was not just going to be undone in an hour! So in the end I gave up on the kitchen and washing up and tackled the toys, as above. And once, I'd mostly finished with that, I moved onto the kitchen/craft table which was an utter mess. It wasn't just the table that was a mess. There was paper and craft bits all over the floor. It was horrendous:

 

I first of all cleared the windowsill (I didn't take a picture of this but it was dirty and needed cleaning) and wiped it down. Then I started clearing the table. Anything that needed washing I dumped in the sink, I got a binbag and got rid of any dried paint, used paper (non-masterpieces), "sticking" bits and bobs that were not in good condition and basically anything that looked like rubbish and gave the table a really good clean.

I relocated the paints from the top of the fridge to on top of the drawer unit and labelled the drawers:

 

I found an unused tin that had previously had sugar in it (before I moved all that stuff into glass jars during my larder rejig) and put pens and pencils in it. 

As you can see, the kids are enjoying having a nice clean table to play at! This was also the first time Lala had sat at the table to do drawing. She sat there for AGES happy as a happy happy thing (can't think of any clever comparisons right now, but she was QUIET and sat still so that shows how HAPPY she was! lol). 

 

In other news I got myself a new kitchen bin! Woopee!!! No more plastic bags hanging on the bottle opener for the dog to tear a hole in and empty all over the floor!

 

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!