Sticks and Stars

I was thinking of creating a new blog just to track my process of moving into and prettying up my new house (closing tomorrow!) but then I thought maybe I’d just write about it here instead. So consider yourselves warned, I will now be writing way too much about the potentially intensely boring machinations of my decor-frenzied brain…

Idea: Currently my boys have toy storage in the form of two of these stair step cabinets from IKEA and one of these modular cubey units. They work okay except that, particularly with the bins, my kids can’t see the toys so they often don’t play with them, and in the case of all of the storage, there’s too much to see so they are somewhat overwhelmed by choices (and it lives in their closet, so they don’t really see it at all).

In their new room they are going to have less space than they currently have and although I had a plan for getting it to all fit, it occurred to me that I could buy some kind of three cube storage thingy on wheels (essentially one third of the nine cube unit I linked to above), or a bunch of them rather, and then rotate the toys in and out of the closet. Just a few days ago I rearranged my boys’ toys to mask the fact that I got rid of a bunch of them and they were thrilled with the change, seeing all their toys for the first time again. If I stored their toys on wheeled storage units, I could keep some fresh in the room and others waiting in the closet, and then switch them out as interest waned. And if I made sure to only use clear storage bins, they could always see what was within.

I think I’ll still have to keep one of the IKEA storage units, if for no other reason than that they so successfully store our plethora of train tracks (although in the past year I managed to convince my six year old to part with all but the wooden Thomas/Brio/etc. stuff and our massive collection of GeoTrax), but I could tape nice photos of the contents of those bins to the outside…even if the tracks never quite get forgotten like the other toys.