House with two children

[Houseandhome]

Hi.

We’re looking to move to a new build with two children- 4 and 1 year old. Was just wondering where people store toys? At the moment we have a kallax in the front room and then a little table and play kitchen in the kitchen, I always feel like I never have space for toys and in the new house we won’t have a separate front room for toys either.

Thanks

We have a playroom now, but before we moved house, we had a very open plan downstairs and toys everywhere was a real issue...every surface was covered in them - felt like we could never relax. I got a couple of cheap ottomans from The Range in the same colour scheme as the downstairs...so on a night we could just launch any toys into them and close the lid. Recently I have tried to make sure toy storage is right in their bedrooms too - I’ve tried to make it easy for them to keep more stuff in their rooms rather than downstairs (and in order). I have found that these shelves are good to help the kids tidy up...I have even thought about putting pictures on the front of the drawers so they know where things go, but haven’t got around to that yet. These were just from Amazon.

You just need to be smart with storage! We have trundle bed for our kids and store toys under there. Also have IKEA units with doors along the living room wall for the tv. Jam packed with toys - just close the doors over and it looks tidy again!

I’m struggling with toys, we are open plan & my living room area has exploded with toys since Christmas! I’ve got one kallax but bought another smaller cube storage unit & a large ottoman for underneath the window. Really cheap in Dunelm & holds loads! Otherwise, I’m divining you toys to live in bedrooms & also doing a toy rotation with some living in the garage/loft for a couple months & rotate!

I find bedroom toys hard with young children. Mine are 3 & 10 months. Not old enough to just go play upstairs & my 3 year old sees upstairs as bedtime so doesn’t like it up there in the daytime. So the toys get brought back downstairs or not played with 😕 I’m hoping that’ll improve as she gets older!

I declutter a lot as really hate toys everywhere. We have a large kallax in our living room and then the children just keep the rest of their toys in their rooms. We have lots of loft space so I do store some up there and get it down when they get bored of their current toys.

Glad I’m not the only one, sometimes it feels like everyone has toy rooms or conservatories to store their toys

Will you have an integral garage? My old childminder used to amaze me with her 2 min transformation from home to fully equipped nursery. She had shelves just inside her garage with a door going from her kitchen diner into it.

Have a playroom now but in our previous smaller house they were kept in the dcs bedroom plus a storage box in the living room

We had a dining room and limited toys to an 8 cube kallax in there, plus a couple of bits in bedrooms.

In bedrooms when they were little we had something a bit like this but you can absolutely store more in bedrooms if you want to. Get them good solid single beds with good quality, solid based drawers underneath, or use a wardrobe for all their clothes and a trofast or similar for toys.

I think the key is to be judicious in what toys you buy and rotate things to the downstairs. They don't need a farm and a doll's house and a fire station and an airport and a toy garage, they can do a lot with a couple of carefully chosen ones and perhaps some extra cardboard boxes. Or if they're into dollies they don't need bunk beds and a pram and a buggy and a high chair and a car seat. Get them lots of small accessories (bottles, a real spoon and bowl, rattle, their own outgrown baby clothes and blankets), a fold up buggy, and teach them to use the actual furniture/ cardboard boxes/drawers etc to pretend the bigger stuff. And make tidy up time a habit every evening.

Kallax in living room and also in bedrooms so the baskets can just get swapped round every so often so toys get rotated that way.

We also replaced our side tables at side of sofa with small sideboard. I can still put a cup of tea/reading glasses on top but inside cupboards is more toy storage.

I also agree with a pp about being judicious. I'm ruthless and have clearouts regularly, DC don't need a mountain of toys and for Christmas etc we tend to request easily stored things like craft materials, sticker books, small schleich figures etc.