Toy Storage 101: The Best Ideas & Solutions for Kid’s Room Sanity

What are the Best Toy Storage Solutions & Ideas for The Kid’s Room?

With kids, come toys… Lots and lots of toys. We learned that pretty quickly. While we appreciate the joy that toys bring to our kids, it’s essential to find good storage solutions – or else the house is quickly taken over, and this does not help anyone’s sanity.

It’s also important to help kids learn to be tidy – an essential life skill. For the benefit of parents and kids alike, considering toy storage ideas is time well spent.

This can be an overwhelming task, but I’ve found plenty of creative storage solutions for the mountains of toys in our home – so let’s take a look at how to tackle this issue and figure out some toy storage solutions for your family.

First Steps Toward Organized Toys: Ideas Behind Good Storage for Playthings

Before anything else, let’s take a look at the basic ideas behind the storage of toys. Whatever solution you choose for your toy storage, these are universal; so keep these principles in mind.

Rule 1 in toy storage: Purge, purge, and purge!

Before you even consider toy storage ideas, it’s essential to lighten the load. Go through all the toys your children own and try to reduce the collection to the things they get the most creative play out of.

When it comes to toys, more is not better; kids are easily overwhelmed, and in fact, they will engage in more quality play if there are fewer options in front of them. Besides, the more toys there are, the harder to clean and organize; having fewer playthings will really help them learn tidy habits.

Granted, it’s not easy to get rid of toys, especially if your children have diverse interests; and that brings us to Rule 2.

Rule 2 in toy storage: Rotation

If, after purging, you still find yourself with a large number of toys in need of storage solutions, never fear. You can still take steps to reduce the toys the kids have access to every day.

Rotating some of their playthings into storage for a few months at a time is a great idea. Using large clear totes is a handy way to do this; when you bring some toys out of storage, put the ones that have been out for a while into the bins, and you’re set.

Kids will get more mileage out of toys if they haven’t seen them for a while: make a plan for rotating collections, and watch your kids be thrilled by playthings that seem new again.

Rule 3 in toy storage: Apply the ‘easy’ factor

The key to helping kids learn to be tidy is to make it easy for them to clean up. If they know exactly where things belong, it’s easy to clean up, and they will do it much more happily. Some examples:

• Make labels for toy bins (include pictures if your children are pre-reading age)
• Set up toy storage solutions that kids can easily reach, and that they can manage
• Have ample storage for the toys you own – overflowing bins are hard to tidy
• Keep limits on the toys available to them so clean-up time is not overwhelming.

Rule 4 in toy storage: Containerize

This goes along with keeping things easy. Simply putting playthings on shelves or on the floor might work for a few larger toys, but for the most part, you need to sort the toys by type and place each type in its own container. For example, put blocks in their own bin, keep train tracks separate from Polly Pockets, and so on.

Using separate, sorted containers is an essential idea – it means your toy storage can be labeled, stacked, and rotated more easily, and makes family life infinitely more simple when it comes time to clean up.

So, with these principles in mind, let’s look at the types of containers that work for toy storage and which ideas are the best solutions for different types of toys.

Idea #1 For Toy Storage: Make Cleaning Up Fun

If you want your kids to happily tidy up their toys, it makes sense to use storage ideas that appeal to them. Having bins with animals on them is a great start.

Three Sprouts has an awesome line of cotton canvas storage bins, featuring different animals printed on a wide variety of shapes; there’s an ideal toy storage solution for every taste. These are made with daily kid use in mind – light enough for a child to move around, but sturdy enough to provide durable storage.

This bin is also lined with a layer of plastic, making the inside easy to wipe out. Best of all, the designs will delight your little ones – and also help to distinguish which things belong in them.

Idea #2 For Kid Toy Storage: Make Cleaning Up Easy

All parents learn, early on, how painful it can be to step on a piece of Lego in the dark – or to crawl around on hands and knees fishing teeny tiny Playmobil clothes from under the couch. If your children like to play with lots of little pieces, give them the green light – but first layout this clever concept, the Lay-n-Go.

Constructed of sturdy nylon fabric, this is designed to function as a play mat – with the brilliant addition of a drawstring, which allows you to gather up a whole lot of tiny pieces at once and store them easily.

This is a great idea for toy storage – the bag can then be hung up in a closet or tucked on a shelf until the next playtime.

It also makes for plenty of flexibility – it’s hard to say yes to your kids wanting to play with small toys outside, for example, for fear of tiny pieces getting lost in the grass; but with a toy storage solution like this, you can let them enjoy it without a worry.

Idea #3 For Storage of Kid’s Toys: Don’t Get Hung Up on the Details

A great idea for toy storage is using wall space. Consider sorting types of toys into cloth bags, then hanging them up from pegs. Label the outside of the bag, or print or draw directly on it, to help remember what lives inside it.

This way you can clearly see what’s inside, the contents can be organized, and it helps to encourage your child to clean up – having a one-bag-at-a-time rule has been really helpful in our home.

Totes like this can also be used to store beach toys and the like – making it easy to transport toys from place to place.

Personally, I like these cloth canvas bags because they aren’t see-through, meaning fewer distractions for little eyes, and I find if my kids can’t see all the toy options at once, they are better able to focus on play.

Kid’s Toy Storage Idea #4: Box Up Small Pieces

One of my all-time favorite toys, yet also one of the trickiest things to keep organized, is Lego. So many tiny pieces! Plus, my children tend to become frustrated when they can’t find the piece they need.

The best Lego storage solution I have come across is also the simplest: sort the blocks by color, and put each color into a clear bin.

This keeps the Lego looking great and also makes it easier to find. Boxes like this by Sterilite are perfect; neither too big nor too small, they are convenient, have visible toy storage ideas – and even have a hinged lid that won’t get lost.

These boxes are also available in a larger rectangle if your child’s Lego collection is on the larger side. Either way, these clear boxes can then be stored on a bookshelf, easily accessible and visible to your kids. Definitely a winning toy storage solution.

Toy Storage Idea #5 For Kids: Make it Blend in

In our home, we find that the kids always want to be where the parents are – and this means the toys are often all over the living room floor.

I fought this for a while, but ultimately I love having them play at my feet – so I realized that we needed a different toy storage solution: a place to stash toys that also looks great in the living room.

The easy, aesthetically pleasing solution? Baskets! Baskets are a great idea for toy storage – they look great, they’re light, and they can be repurposed at the drop of a hat.

I keep several baskets of different sizes in our living room – a shallow one for my toddler’s books, and larger ones for various toy storage, such as my son’s toy cars.

It has really helped to keep the toy population under control, and when it’s time to make the living room look like a living room again, baskets make for quick cleanup. This set of graduated baskets is a great example.

A Few Things to Consider When Planning Storage Solutions for Your Kids’ Toys

There are many great toy storage options out there, but also some lemons. I have come across several ideas that seemed great for toy storage but turned out to be useless. These two, in particular, I would not recommend these:

• Beware of the common toy racks with tilted bins. I’ve owned one and while it first seemed great, in reality, the bins are difficult to access and even harder to put back. They also collect dust and the sizes are awkward for toy storage.
• Beware the old classic – the giant toy bin. These again seem like a great idea, but they quickly become a cavernous dumping ground. It is difficult for small children to reach things at the bottom, and impossible to keep any order to the toys inside. Much better to have things sorted into small bins, which are clearly labeled and easy to access.

One final note of encouragement: try to involve your children in establishing solutions. If they have input as to which toys belong in which bins, and how the labels look, they will likely feel more pride in keeping things tidy.

Onwards and Upwards: Toy Storage Solutions are in Sight

I hope this has been helpful in establishing some basic ideas for toy storage – and steering you in the direction of an orderly home, free of living room disaster zones and/or midnight Lego-related injuries to your feet. I’d love to hear if you found these ideas helpful, and also if you have any further toy storage solutions that I have yet to come across.