Project: Simplify - Toys

The hot spot this week is actually "toys and/or kid's clothes".   I have the kid's clothes all set so it's boring and I have the toys in the kid's rooms (mostly) under control.  That is partly why the toy room looked so terrible.  One thing at a time...  I was really excited to have a challenge this week.  Here it is:

 Doesn't that just make you feel good about yourself?  Not only that, but I had this stack of "rotation" toys in the basement.

 Now, I decided I do not like the layout of the room for the toys.  It turns out that the toys get built up at the top of the stairs so every time we come up, we have to step over toys.  I decided to rearrange the whole room and use the whole south side of room for the toys.  My sewing stuff is on the other side of the room.  It still does not look pretty.  Kind of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde type thing.(another organizing project?!  Yay!)  Oh, back to the task at hand.  Bottom line:  We have too many toys at our house.  One of my children really has a hard time letting ANYTHING go.  The other doesn't seem to even understand that there is a difference between keeping and not keeping.  I told the kids they needed to fill a laundry basket with things to get rid of.  I had to give a 30 second time limit for the Keeper's turn.  The other kid just kept trying to put things away.  I took his turn for him.  So here is the basket:

Good work.  And more importantly, we didn't have any tears.

In the process of the project, I found this gravity-defying dog I wanted to share.  How?!

 Here you will see my after shots.  Bear in mind that this took two days worth of decluttering, moving furniture, bringing up the rotation toys, organizing and then after storing the new rotation toys, discovering that the toys left out for the girl were not fun toys, redoing the rotation toys and then organizing them again. Yes, I thought I had it figured out but when the kids came back up and saw the new layout, I watched my daughter's face as she looked over the girl toys.  Sheer boredom.  Both children went to the boy toys and played nicely together for a couple of hours.  Girls toys were untouched.  Boys toys were no longer organized.  I was kind of excited to see that because the girl toys I left up were mostly really large toys.  I took them to the basement and brought up some others that I'd packed away.  If, when I bring the large toys up in a couple months, they don't get played with right away, they will be going away.  That will feel SO GOOD! The after shot is taken from the top of the stairs.

 I sectioned it off with a girls area at the top of the stairs.

 As you walk into the middle of the room, there is a section with books, puzzles, art supplies, and stuffed animals.

 The far side of the room has the boys section.

Ta-da!  What fun!  To see the difference right next to each other:


Before





After