Organizing the Kid Clutter

Call me over-cautious, but I do not allow the boys to have crayons/markers/pens/pencils/stickers in their bedrooms. I am not a fan of trying to clean "artwork" off the walls and furniture. We have always kept all their art supplies, coloring books and extra paper in the dining room where messes are easy to clean and someone can keep an eye on what is going on.

As they have grown, the amount and type of activities that are housed in the dining room has grown too. We still have the art supplies, but now we have learning and activity books in addition to the coloring books. We have mounds of Play-Doh and the required tools, and now what seems to be an endless supply of puzzles. Play-Doh, for obvious reasons, is in the dining room, because who really wants to clean that out of the carpet? And the puzzles, well you have to have a good space to spread out.

We had an organizing system in place for all of these things, but as the days went on I was growing more and more irritated with the way it all was beginning to look. It just wasn't working they way it was originally set-up. Finally, this weekend I had enough and scoured the basement to find something to make it all work better. Here are the before and after of this weekend's reorganization:

Before:

Too many puzzles, and this just was not a good way to try to organize them. 


Towering stacks of Play-Doh, and coloring and activity books that were eager to jump off the shelves at any moment. Also, please note the giant mess of a storage cube to the right that is spewing paper everywhere.



After:



I flip-flopped the locations of the storage cabinet and the organizing cubbies and then I removed all of the books from the cabinet. I moved the Play-Doh into a wire basket out of the reach of little hands and moved the supplies up a shelf. (Those really cool storage bins holding all the Play-Doh tools are a couple of plastic flower pots that I picked up at Target for less than $2 each after they put all the summer stuff on clearance a couple of years ago.) Also, all of the puzzles fit so much better on these shelves and looks so much neater now.



I removed one of the organizing cubbies that we no longer could utilize in this space (don't worry, it will be very happy and put to good use on my craft table). Now we have all of the markers, pencils, scissors, glue and stickers sorted nicely into their own bins and the crayons are all in the basket on top. I brought a rolling storage cart up from the basement to hold all the paper supplies. One drawer for activity/learning books, one drawer for coloring books, and one drawer for all of the loose paper. I put the green storage cube on top to hold the coloring books they use most often and a dry-erase board they like to draw on.


I must say, once this was all done I felt so much better. The space is more organized, there is not paper all over the floor and I didn't have to spend one penny on any of it! How do you store your kids' art/coloring supplies?



 ~~Stephanie~~




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