Tidying Up Tuesday: Amelia's Room

Another late TUT post, but in my defense, I spent yesterday morning at the boys' school helping out with their Read-a-Thon. So Amelia's room had to wait until today.

The biggest issue with Amelia's room is of course that she is only 4, and it's hard for her to clean up by herself. My goal was to simplify her room as much as possible and make clear places for things to go.

Her room isn't too messy in this "before" photo, but hopefully you can see that the farm and other toys (to the left of the play kitchen) are just sitting to the side, without a true assigned spot. The play kitchen food is another major issue in her room; it contributes to a lot of the mess simply because there is so much of it.

In this photo of the pile of toys, you might notice in the background the furniture from the boys' room. Ryan is putting up the trim this week, so we cleared everything out of their room and put it in the living room. It was a million times easier because the room had been KonMari'd and everything had an assigned space. We just moved the assigned spaces out to the living room. 

The "keep" pile. Unsurprisingly, Amelia wanted to keep pretty much everything. 

Sorting through toys is hard work!

I wasn't 100% sure of how I wanted to organize everything, so I brought it all into Amelia's room and started grouping things into piles to see what might fit on the shelves. This is what that looked like when we took a break for lunch.

Finished product: the shelves have "figures" (My Little Ponies, farm animals, etc) in one cube, Barbies in another, a "random" cube, and dress-ups in the last cube. Two of the shelves have stuffed animals in bins.

I bought small bins to contain the play kitchen food and accoutrements. That should make it easier to clean up. The baby dolls and accessories take up the rest of the space under the bed.

I love Dollar Store bins. They are perfect for storage. No expensive bins needed; cheapo ones work just fine!

Having Amelia's room so well organized will make it easy to move her into the living room when Ryan puts the trim up in her room. I better get cracking on our room! It's a disaster, to put it mildly.