Playroom Chaos- where do we begin?

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One of the best things about where we live is that we have a basement to use as a playroom for the kids. When the neighbors come over, or my own  kids need some space to be crazy and messy, I send them downstairs and tell them to go nuts. I try to keep it organized, but sometimes it just takes the backseat. Having an area out of the way that I don't have to look at on a regular basis is a double edged sword- because yes it's out of the way, but after several weeks of ignoring it, it starts to look like this:



 and this:   

I'm sure anyone with kids is going through the same thing that I am going through right now- making sense of the current state of their home after Christmas. Yes I know it's been WEEKS since Christmas, but who really gets anything accomplished until the kids go back to school anyway?

If your kids rooms, or playrooms, or entire house, are a mishmash of unorganized toys- here's my suggestion of how to get started:

I did this process last year with organizing a closet- and here's another example to show you how it works in any space. Just take the words from my blog title and use them as reminders of each step along the way.
Re-Introducing, The Clean, Smart, Simple Style process!  -{Clean}-Just grab a trash bag, start at one end, and move through the room throwing away things that are garbage, broken, useless, unidentifiable, belong to a "set" that you no longer own, or came as a toy from a Happy Meal. I had two entire garbage bags full of things from those categories.

-{Smart}-Making your space smart, means making it make sense. As you are moving through the room, start to make piles of non-garbage things that go together. Get all of the Legos back into one place, separate the Barbie stuff from the art supplies, put the plastic food and dishes near the play kitchen. Things don't have to have "homes" yet, you just need to sort like with like and start to think about defining a purpose for the space.

-{Simple }-Once things are reasonably sorted, it's time to make some deep cuts. In order to make the space simple, you need to donate the excess, so get ready to donate!

You guys, I sent a pretty large toy donation pile out before Christmas, and I STILL put out 10 bags. TEN BAGS, of stuff for donation last week.

REALLY think about the last time that someone played with it (before they saw you trying to get rid of it). REALLY think about how often you see it being used in the future.

I'm sentimental about my kids stuff too, but it's more important to me to have space to enjoy what we have. And, the most important thing to remember is that some people have nothing. As sentimental as I am about some of the toys that we own that have been well loved and played with over the last 6 years, I know that at a certain point they are just collecting dust and there are families out there that will love them as much as my kids used to. It's stupid and selfish of me to keep things that we really don't need.

Keeping stuff doesn't keep your kids young.
It's the truth.

-{Style}-Once you've finished the trashing, sorting, and donating- you can think about organizing and beautifying the space- but take it one step at a time. I know I still have plenty of work to do in the first few stages before I'm ready to do anything more to our basement!

If you're ahead of the game and ready to move forward, start to think about shelving, bins, buckets, rows of hooks, repurposing furniture...whatever you need to do to keep your space feeling organized and looking great.