Please show me your clever toy storage

[meladeso]

It's becoming clear that the neat and tidy storage we have means the kids can't see or remember what toys they have, so most don't get touched.

It's a waste and I think we need a rethink! My nice neat cupboards and boxes look very tidy but have turned out to be a bad idea really.

Please show me how you store toys in a way that makes them easily accessible?

I have 2 DC under 7.

TIA.

Labels for the outside of the cupboards and boxes (words and photo perhaps). I have the Ikea Kallax and it works semi well. Never have time to declutter it and sort out old toys - if I did it would work better.

Growing up we had a huge wooden toy box for long term toys and then large fabric storage bags for day to day use.

We have this problem too. For ages I wanted neat and tidy storage, now we have cupboards and the toys in there get forgotten, I find myself leaving things out so they get played with.

For the cupboards, I wonder if you could take the doors off for say 2 years, and then put them back on when kids are older? I’d consider doing this except our cupboards aren’t mine to mess with.

Something we do have which works quite well is open boxes under the coffee table. The stuff under there gets played with a lot (much more than cupboard items) but can easily be pushed back under the table. Not as tidy as cupboards though.

There isn't a coffee table in their playroom otherwise that suggestion is a good one!
I have seen some sort of open / angled stacked storage come to think of it. I'll see if I can find some online...

IKEA kallax here. I gave in after Christmas and it has made things much less cluttered and dds can see what they want to play with and then put it back which they never do

Something like this?

We have these on one side of our playroom

@RaindropDreams that's sweet! It looks a bit like a toy shop

@Ricekrispie22 yes! That's the sort of thing I've seen.

I rotate toys - every few days I’ll bring different things out and put away stuff that isn’t being played with. My toddler loves this, as soon as he goes downstairs every morning he goes straight to see what’s out!
Means I can hide most stuff away in the cupboard without it being forgotten about

Basically like Raindrops', only ours was more spaced out. Billy, and an assortment of baskets and trays from a charity shop. A few clear colourless boxes, Eg IKEA samla, though these don't fit brilliantly with the billy . Give them 3 puzzles put on a shelf and 3 games on another shelf, not 20 rammed into a storage cube. It was astonishing how this increased the amount they played. We had kallax for "back room" storage and Billy for the stuff they were actually using.

I think I tried most things over the years, and this was my favourite. It's what they had at our nursery.

Now they are older, they mostly play with boxed games like Triv or 1000 piece puzzles, so we've reverted back to Kallax.

One of the nice things about billy is you can buy extra shelves. We had several very shallow ones for stuff like puzzles and pegboards.