To just throw out most of the toys and start over?

[Malteasercheesecake]

I know this is my own fault but we are in a toy nightmare. Countless jigsaws with missing pieces, toys that have several different pieces (eg toy car transporter with several different cars but all of them all over the place and don’t know how to find them amongst the several thousand other toy cars.)

Obviously some toys will survive the cull but is it really awful just to throw most of them away and start over?

I’m exhausted just reading that @SgtJuneAckland 😂

Jigsaws with missing pieces that can’t be sorted are pointless, chuck. Car transporters on the other hand, just go with it, don’t need to be perfect. Get good storage and work through it over a week or so, call along the way.

My Mother threw out most of my toys when I was 8, at school. I was so upset and have never forgotten it.
Please talk it over with the children. Explain that between you all, you need to find all the pieces. Then once the task is done, anything broken or incomplete will go to make room for new.

@Malteasercheesecake keeping things tidy and organised takes effort. It's that simple. We both work full time shifts flexed around each other for childcare etc and I don't want to live in a tip and I don't want my DC to think that's ok either. How can you relax in the evenings with toys everywhere?

It does take effort but like many things once started is hard to stop. I cleared up last night before bed and several drawers and boxes have already been emptied, and I do feel I need to do SOMETHING, as drastic as some may think it is to throw some away.

Eight is hugely different to three. I have never known DS ask for or show real attachment towards a particular toy (unless one of his friends is over and goes near it in which case it’s the most precious toy in the whole world.)

And here is a photo of the play area from just a few days ago

So I don’t live in squalor, but what does happen (and I accept I am guilty of this) is that it is hidden mess, the toys are muddled and mixed in those boxes and as soon as DS starts rooting through there’s a mess everywhere which makes cleaning hard. (Incidentally that’s a play area separate to the main lounge and dining area.)

I am not the best housekeeper in the world or the most organised person but I don’t think there was any need for the barely disguised disgust in the above post.

Honestly you just need more storage and then it's easier to keep tidy.

Part of the challenge is when there is too much in a box.

Eg if you have a box full of cars then he gets the cars out, and it's really easy to teach that the car box is tidied away before you get the train set box out.

Order a trofast from ikea to go under the window with lots of trays and life will be better.

not sure what type area you live, but put a post on local Facebook page for donating the toys. Near me we have centres that cater to families who have nothing; could be refugees, families fleeing domestic violence etc. someone may love your bag of toys and it get it out the house 🏠

Because even a three year old can then get the boxes out and then put them back.

Then use the chest of drawers for things that he can only get out with you, complex puzzles etc and explain he's not allowed in the drawers without asking mummy first

He can, but whether he will is entirely another matter

explain he's not allowed in the drawers without asking mummy first

You have a more compliant three year old than me!

It's a challenge, isn't it! This won't help you now, but when you get a new jigsaw, take all the bits out and write the number 1 in marker on the back of each bit. Next puzzle, write the number 2. And so on. Then it's easier to sort muddled jigsaws.

Ha. It takes a while but they do learn what they can and can't touch

I’m probably in the minority but I would be feeling the same as you op. So yes, I would get rid of stuff by whatever means. I’m sure there will still be plenty for your children to play with.

Most of them are those wooden ones, for much younger children. I am not sure DS has the concept of jigsaws too well, he was bought some for Christmas, emptied the pieces all over the floor and moved on I think the new ones are all together but on the bookshelves, away from hell chaos.

You have a younger baby too?

So you must have toys that are in-between, too young for oldest, too advanced for youngest.

Decide what is too young for your 3yo. Sort what's worth keeping and pack it away out of sight.

Go for it, OP. Donate what you can to charity and dump the rest. Your mental wellbeing will thank you for it!

Oh, and I can relate to the feeling of overwhelm!

Yes this is what I did too! Until my dc were old enough to not mix them up.

Sympathies @Malteasercheesecake I first joined Mumsnet when searching in frustration when feeling buried alive in toys when my first got to about the same age as your son. There was a thread similar to this that used the phrase “peak toy” which really resonated with me. My in laws were (are!) serial over buyers and it was the source of so much upset anger and even tears.

Storage that also organises is your friend. I bought a unit with 12 spaces, each held a big plastic box. We labelled each drawer with words and pictures so cars, fire engines, jigsaws, play dough. My son then liked to help tidy as it was like the system used at nursery and he could match the thing to the picture. Some things needed their own larger box such as a duplo train set and for those I had a few separate plastic crates. The boxes and drawstring bags that a pp has linked look good but I did keep all the orchard games and jigsaws in their original boxes within the plastic boxes. Do you watch “sort your life out” the organiser lady on there often has to deal with toy storage might be worth getting a few ideas.

I do think binning it all and starting again would be wasteful, expensive and potentially upsetting for your son if a favourite is suddenly lost. It would also likely be pointless if you do not change the storage that you use you will just find the next lot of stuff muddled up and flung into the same storage chests.

Organising means that it will also be easier to keep things that are not suitable for the baby like with smaller pieces contained to minimise risk of choking

I know it was probably some years ago, but do you have a link to the sort of storage you mean?

Same here - I do this regularly now throughout the whole house, it’s a good feeling when it’s done.

I'm recently out of the other side of it and had a huge 3 stage decluttering in order to redecorate a room.

The reality is that it's very easy to gain too much stuff of little interest to children. And the more they have, the less they play with it. We gained a lot from gifts from extended family and hand-me-downs from a large number of cousins as mine are the youngest. Then there was the birthday parties... I could have cried after the birthday party when the entire class came bearing half the contents of the Toys R Us closing down sale.
Most of these things don't tend to be well-loved. We know the difference between favourites and passing novelty.

Break the mission down in to small blocks. You can achieve a lot with regular 15 min rounds.

I'd look at the playroom floor, set a workout timer into intervals of work/ rest, so I'd look for the most obvious theme... 2 mins picking up cars and putting away. In the 30s rest, I'd look for the next obvious theme e.g. 2 mins of duplo.
Use shoe boxes/ sweet tubs as temporary sorting storage.

I could handle bitty stuff like duplo that can be reassembled in any order, but there are so many shitty toys that need specific parts in a specific order that are just unmanagable. Tracey Island, a Playmobile fire station and a marble run were all memorably offensively expensive disintegrating shite that spent far, far more time in crumpled heaps and missing heaps in an unplayable state than being played with, and all got rage-binned... and they were not missed. The marble run was replaced with a basic Galt one and that got far more play because it was open ended and flexible than the fancy one.

Donate what you can, but the reality is that there is too much crap not fit to be sent on for future use. That's a design and society issue. There's not much point in blaming consumers who thought that they were buying a decent brand or people drowning in token gifts.

Life is so much tidier since The Great Sort Out, and sorting decent storage for the surviving toys, and we can now cope with tidying it; even the DS who at 3, mastered the art of hiding under the cushions in the book corner at tidy-up time at nursery 😂

Why do they have so much and why don't they take better care of it?

Probably because they are either the youngest in the family with lots of hand ms downs or the oldest with well meaning grandparents who buy far too much.

3 year olds are not the best at caring for stuff. There is a reason we give them tommie tippie cups rather than crystal glasses to drink out of.