Finding Order

I’m sure every mom can relate to the struggle of trying to keep the kiddies toys and books and puzzles in some semblance of order and making it resemble anything bordering neatness!

Previously I used to buy storage bins but they just seemed to cause more chaos, as all the toys were dumped into them, and very quickly got swallowed into the chaos. That means that when the kids were looking for one thing in particular they would have to go through the entire box (read as tip out everything from the box onto the floor!) before they found it. That resulted in me getting annoyed by the stuff on the floor, and them getting annoyed by me nagging them to clean it up! As to be expected, there wasn’t much fun to be had thereafter…

I decided then to sort the toys in separate categories and organise them into smaller boxes. A half hearted attempt at searching for such boxes proved futile. Also around this time, we were clearing out the garage and I came across this huge collection of round plastic containers (yep the kind you get when you buy homemade biscuits 🙂 ) instead of throwing these out, I decided to recycle them…well, up-cycle, and re-purpose them.

This is what I did:
1. Do a google image search for an appropriate picture/ border. I settled on 2 different patterns.
2. Print these out, and cut them to size.
3. Make sure containers are washed clean, and properly dried.
4. Using thick sellotape, we ‘self-laminated’ them onto the containers. Little Miss helped.
5. The end result was much nicer than I imagined.

We used one for ‘kitchen toys’, one for cars, one for doll dresses, ect. They were then stacked up on the shelves in her room. Now we just need one small container at a time, clean up is easier, and the rooms are more organised too!