From clothing to toys to school supplies, children come with a lot of gear. While most of what your children have around the house is necessary for one reason or another, failure to keep it organized will result in a chaotic and cluttered house. Furthermore, some parents have other obstacles to deal with when it comes to organization such as a toddler who won't keep things in the dresser drawers, tiny closets, small bedrooms, or more than one child which results in two of everything.
Tips For Outside the Home
Have a sandbox in the yard for your children to play in? Consider attaching planter baskets to the outside of the sandbox to keep the sandbox toys organized.
Do you have a garage or a storage shed in the yard? Consider looking for a nice, sturdy wooden cabinet at garage sales or thrift stores. You can use the cabinet to store outdoor toys in your storage shed or garage. You could even hang chalkboards or whiteboards on the inside of the doors. When you open the cabinet doors, your children will have a fun place to draw. You could even use the chalkboard or whiteboard to create a checklist of what should be in the cabinet. This way you can teach your child clean-up and organization skills by encouraging him or her to check off the list every day.
Do you have toys that stay outside? Consider getting baskets or milk crates and hanging them on your fence. This creates a great storage space for all of your children's outdoor toys.
Tips For Inside the Home
Consider purchasing some plastic or aluminum buckets. Then, you can get some cheap labels to label the buckets with what you want your child to store in the buckets. You can put the buckets on the shelves and have a different bucket for each type of toy or play activity. Then, you can teach your child to play with one toy or play activity at a time. He or she can put everything back in the bucket and give it to you before requesting another bucket.
If you don't like the buckets, you could do the same thing with small baskets and labels. Some people even like getting small baskets and hanging them on a wall or inside of a cabinet with labels above or below the baskets.
Have a lot of board games? Board games double as pretty incredible wall art. Put the bulky boxes up or throw them away, and hang that gorgeous game board on the wall. You can put the pieces and any instructions in a zip lock back and hook it to the back of the game board before you hang it on the wall.
Consider purchasing a few over-the-door shoe organizers. In addition to being ideal for organizing and storing shoes, they are great for storing lots of other things as well. You can hang them on the door of your pantry to store and organize snacks, for example. You could also hang them on the door of a closet or a wall to store arts and crafts supplies and/or school supplies. These organizers can really be used to store anything small. If your child has a lot of Hot Wheels, for example, this could be a fun way to store them.
As you can see, there are tons of fun ways and easy for you to store your children's gear. You may even have some of the equipment you need to store the items already in your home waiting to be used!
Need some guidance to get started? WOW Organizing Services is a local company that can work with you one-on-one to transform your chaos into calm. They are offering HoneyTree families a special Mother's Day Gift Certificate for a 3 hours session valued at $150 for only $99! Visit www.woworganizing.com and mention promo: HoneyTree to receive this discount. (Offer valid in Roanoke City, Roanoke County, Salem, Vinton, and Franklin County until June 20, 2016)