Talk to me about toy storage!

[IwishIwasmoreorganised]

We have 2 ds's aged 5 and 3. They have the normal boxed toys, cars, colouring, books etc and lots of Playmobil and Lego.

It's the Playmobil and Lego (once the kits are made into the different things, not the lose building bricks) that I'm struggling to store.

Any top tips?

Keep on display for a few days, they'll gradually lose bits (and kids interest), then quietly dismantle and store :)

Store how?

Do I just throw all the bits of Lego into one huge tub and hope that we can find all of the weeny bits when they want to build them again or should I invest in loads of different sized tubs for each individual set?

The Playmobil things can't really be dismantled (think vehicles, boats, trailers etc). they seem to take up more than their fare share of space - all on top of units.

Out playmobil got dismantled and chucked into large containers with lids. You can take them apart surely? they tend never to get made again in the same way obviously!

Enough of the investing! Put the bits by size in sandwich bags then altogether in big box.

Put all of the Lego in one big box. Hunting for all the bits to follow the instructions is half the fun!

Also IMO allows for more creativity when building own models.

I have happy memories of spending hours rummaging through a huge box of Lego as a child.

Definitely one big box for the Lego, works for us. My friend invested in those boxes that had drawers in, like you'd put screws in in a garage iyswim, she spent literally days sorting all the bits into types and sizes. Kids come along, and you can guess what happens...

I have two girls of the same age so playmobil and Sylvanian family so have been through the same issue with storage. We have used a 4x2 cube expedit bookcase from ikea on it's side. The houses and playmobil hospital sit on top, the lots of open cubes for vehicles and other smaller buildings then some storage boxes in the cubes for random smaller bits. Then next it we have a Trofast cabinet, again ikea, with 9 trays (like old school trays) with the playmobil tiny bits. In theory a tray for people, furniture, animals etc etc which stays in order for a bit then all gets muddled till you next sort it out. For us it was worthwhile getting usable storage for it as they play with it all loads.

Fresh We've got the same size Expedit with a lot of the vehicles, trailers and boats on the top - they seem to waste a lot of space in the draws that we got for a couple of the sections.

I think I'll have to bit the bullet and dismantle some of the Lego - a lot of them haven't been played with since the start of the holidays and having to rebuild them might spark the next wave of interest!

I like the plastic bag idea FootballFriend, not sure whay that didn't occur to me before!