Keep your household mess under control with a few handy tips.
Storing Books, CDs and DVDs
• Savvy stacking. DVDs and books can look good if they’re properly lined up, but quickly get chaotic when taken in and out by smaller children. Store them on shelves that are easy for you to restack, rather than too tightly packed together, as this increases the temptation to just stuff stray books on top. (Make sure you attach shelves to the wall in some way if you have smaller children prone to climbing up.)
With DVDs your children are likely to pull out themselves, it might be easier to keep these in a smaller box by the television set. Otherwise your main DVD collection will be pulled apart every time your child is looking for his favourite film.
• CD control. CDs easily become tumbling towers of broken plastic cases. You can spend a lot of money buying specially designed CD shelves that only take 50-200 CDs at a time. If you have a larger collection, IKEA’s long-running favourite, the Billy bookshelf, can be adapted as a very cost-effective way of storing around 1000 CDs for about £100. The shelves are a little too deep, but if you put old cassette cases (or something similar in size) behind the CDs, you will find that the CDs line up just right. The variety of widths and heights in the Billy range, plus the option to add extra shelves, really make this a good choice.
Toy storage
• Consider kitchen wall units in bedrooms. You may well be short on floor space in your child’s bedroom – so much carpet room is taken up by the bed, desk, clothes drawers and a decent amount of play area – so wall units can be a good option. For children’s bedrooms, where there is likely to be a mix-n-match style going on anyway, choosing a plain wood kitchen wall cupboard can be a perfect alternative to regular shelves that get dangerously over-stacked with books and games. Choose cupboards with wooden handles, or go for funky doors so they look less ‘kitcheny’ and more like they’d suit any modern room.
• Keeping cuddly toys in check. For light toys like cuddly teddies, a fabric, pop-up ‘laundry basket’, like the ones you can get from Wilkinsons for about £5 is really useful as it can be folded down when not in use, plus it’s easy for your children to move around. (Carrying a filled basket back up to a bedroom from the garden or lounge is much easier than armfuls of toys.) Argos also have a range of pop-up storage boxes with characters like Dora the Explorer and Thomas the Tank Engine.
• Storage tubs, not fixed drawers. For toys, opt for a two-level storage unit that you can add tubs to. Argos have a roomy version that comes to around £85 when you add your own choice of coloured tubs to fill it, and IKEA also do some cost-effective options. What’s great about tubs instead of drawers is that you can put all the Lego in one tub, cars in another, or Barbie dolls in another, and that tub travels to where your child is playing with that kind of toy. Then it’s filled back up again and returned to the shelf unit in one piece for next time.