Tackle-It Tuesday ~ Organized Kids' Shelves

With a very small house (936 square feet) and increasingly more kids' stuff, we decided we needed a way to help them keep their things neat and organized. This system has been working for two weeks now, so I feel fairly confident that with continued training this method will work for our family.

In our living room we have a large cubical style bookshelf. We've designated the bottom two shelves to kids' toys and books. The top two shelves hold books that belong to Tim and me, CDs, and movies.

We had been simply shoving all of Emahry's toys into the cubes on the bottom shelves, which inevitable meant that toys were constantly falling all over the floor.

When Jonathan was born, we received these wonderful plastic bins and had planned to use them on the bookshelf in the children's room. However, a couple of weeks ago, I decided they would be put to better use organizing the living room shelves.

So after some purging and reorganizing we have two neat and organized shelves for the kids' toys and books. Jonathan even got his own baby toy bin. The bins help Emahry keep things together. They also make it easy to pick up toys since we can just place the bin on the floor where she can fill it and then place it back on the shelf. Emahry already know what goes in each bin and where each bin goes.

In case you're interested, this is how we divided the toys. (bottom shelf first, from left to right)

Jonathan's Baby Toys, Wooden Alphabet Blocks, Miscellaneous Toys (these are rotated out every couple of weeks with toys that are put away in the children's bedroom), Emahry's Little Things (small toys and miscellaneous objects that Emahry likes to play with). Emahry's dolls, More dolls and a baby wipes container of Little Books, Books.

Now if I could just get around to organizing Tim's and my things on the top two shelves :)

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