Any Kallax or Expedit experts out there?

[Cressandra]

Not really sure what's the right board for this, but you lot seem nice and I think this is about organising more than decor.

Our DC are now 9 and 7, and our playroom storage is not working as well as it used to. We settled for years on mainly Billy open shelves, with the idea that DC could see a limited number of their toys and we could rotate. It worked well, but I think they've outgrown it and we don't need to have everything out on display any more. I'd like to go back to some cleaner-looking storage with less visual clutter. I'm planning to move the Billy up to DS's room and replace the playroom storage with 20 cubes of kallax.

I just wondered if anyone could advise on a good mix of boxes, baskets, cupboard units and open shelves for older children's stuff? Visually, I'd like lots of the cupboards, but are they impractical in practice? Are you forever finding that games are a bit too long or wide to fit in? Are the cubes too limiting if they are more or less the only storage in the room? Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Also, please convince me I want white, not birch effect. I think white makes more sense with the colour scheme, but I do like the mellowness of the birch, and white melamine reminds me of my childhood bedroom in the 1980s.

[BoulevardOfBrokenSleep]

You could have birch surrounds with white boxes/cupboards/etc (or a mix of colours), would that work?

I like the fabric boxes, I label the front of them with chalk so you can instantly find the Lego/whatever box. Games mostly seem to fit I think. You could check measurements?

The baskets aren't much cop, they are fraying in use and small things poke out the edges and get wedged.

The drawer insert is really only useful for pens/pencils, they are quite small and delicate.

Don't have any cupboard inserts.

Open shelves not good if you are trying to reduce 'visual clutter', because of course all unidentified crap gets shoved on there. Not only by the kids

[InsertUsernameHere]

I have a big expedit - 25 hole one, but in the circumstances you mention I think I'd go and buy doors for the billy you have! Once you turn expedit into cupboards or drawers you have quite limited space. The boxes are better suited to younger toys IMHO. They also look very playroom-y which is maybe a look you want to move away from. See what other think.

[SwedishEdith]

What about Besta? You can mix and match the depths and leave open, have drawers or have cupboards.

[Cressandra]

Thank you, lots of food for thought already! Very interesting as so often you hear that kallax is the answer to everything.

I'd ruled out doors for the billy because we have lots of board games and tubs of things such as k'nex, and quite a few are deeper than the billy. That's ok on a open shelf, albeit not that pretty, but once you put doors on you can't use the cupboard for anything deeper than the shelves, ever. 28cm is just too shallow as a hard limit on depth. Plus we have limited wall space and something deeper would make more efficient use of it.

I'm off to look at besta.

[Cressandra]

Besta does look good but it doesn't work for our space. It's all 60/120/180cm wide so rubbish with my 172cm space. Thanks for the idea though.

[BlueBananas]

We have a mix of Kallax/Expedit and Persby floating shelves

The shelves are good for bigger things, different shaped baskets and things that are one-on-their-own kind of toys
Would also be good for DVDs and books, I definitely wouldn't do without the shelves

The board games are in the Kallax cupboards and fit fine, we have 2 draws but they're shit, too shallow and no back on them so stuff just falls down the back, they're mainly a house for mcdonalds toys (my kids are younger than yours) and shit like that that are too precious to bin apparently

We have the brightly coloured fabric boxes which do look playroomy but they now do more neutral colours like brown, black and I think a beigey one, or of course the wicker baskets

[KP86]

We have kallax for toys in my son's room, and use the fabric boxes (£2.50) from IKEA. They come in lots of colours, so take your pick. The boxes are easy to pull in and out, easy to replace if they get damaged and if we have something that's too big we can pull a box out, collapse it and then out the item in the shelf by itself. I don't think the permanent inserts etc are worth the £.

In our old house we had high gloss white expedit which I loved (baby's room) but we sold those when moving and now have dark brown. Depends on the rest of your room I think.

I personally hate the birch colour. It looks really fake to me.

[Cressandra]

Thank you both.

I am not too worried about drona boxes looking playroomy. They are still children. I thought I'd have at least a line of them along the bottom for hexbugs, traintracks, scalextric, soft toys. But i'm not so convinced about them for all the games and puzzles, when the DC want to select just one from a whole cube. We have mainly games these days.

This is really useful, thank you.

I've also found the Metod full height kitchen cupboards would fit, but I think they might be less easy to use day to day.

[Leeloo2]

Would the games fit vertically into the drona boxes?

It's a tip from the marie kondo school of organising, but if games (well, anything) are arranged vertically in drawers then you can see at a glance what you have and select easily, whereas if they're horizontal then you always either see/ pick the top one or risk a landslide trying to get at anything else. :-)

[BlueBananas]

They will fit horizontally in a cupboard insert, so you don't have to get every one out to find one, like you would in a box or basket

[Leeloo2]

Oh and I have trofast, pax wardrobes and kallax storage for toys. I find trofast best for most things as the drawers are shallower, so better for smaller toys. (sticklebricks /duplo/lego/cars etc etc) with double height for traintracks etc.

In the 4 cube kallax we have dressing up, Octonauts tat toys, gross motor toys (stepping stones, balls, pogo thingy), and... something else... they're behind the Xmas tree right now so I can't check (just asked 7 year old what's in those drawers and he said 'no idea' so they really are underused). I find they are too deep really, and anything you want gravitates to the bottom.

Everyone else swears by them, so maybe just my mismanagement! I do think they'd be good for toy rotation and plan to try that after Xmas. :-)

[wonkylegs]

We have the 4x4 Kallax and have 4 cupboard inserts across the bottom, 6 fabric boxes and the rest open shelves.
The baby toys go in the cupboards and 4 boxes at the bottom. Then 2 boxes of 7yo DSs random toys and then the open shelves have lego in clear shoe boxes or made lego models or lego books. We have a seperate cupboard for board games.
We have the White gloss unit with red cupboards, & red & white fabric boxes - it looks smart.
Our family room is White with a red sofa and red pictures.

[IrritableBitchSyndrome]

We basically live in house-of-kallax these days. It holds so much stuff! We have 1 expedit 5×5, 2 kallax 4x4, 1 1 x5, 4 2x2, 1 4x2... various colours in different rooms. The woven baskets catch on things, the banana leaf basket bottoms fall out, drona is good, although the greeny yellow colour had a strong cat wee smell from the first moment of being opened that we could never shift. Ikea did not reply to my queries about this so we ended up binning them. All other colours smell fine! They are easy to store flat, too, so at present we have some shelves of books and games, with the drona boxes that were in those cubes folded flat under a bed in case we need them again.

[Cressandra]

ooh more tips, thank you all. Leeloo & wonkylegs, thanks it's really helpful to hear the detail of how you organise things. Bluebananas that's what I have in mind, as long as the boxes aren't too big. DC manage piles of games fine on open shelves. Irritable you really do sound like an expert on this!! Your house must be enormous.

I'm fairly sure that trofast doesn't suit us these days, we have too many rectangular boxes and they don't work with the rounded corners. I've gone full circle in the last 24h looking at besta, pax, metod and even some non-ikea options (shock horror! though frankly none came close within my price range) and I think I'm back to kallax again.

We might need one set of drawers, even though they're rubbish, or DS's top trumps and dice collection will never see the light of day again.