7 Little
Things That You Can do to
Organize the Kids' Rooms
Copyright © 2005 Karen Fritscher-Porter
Easy Home Organizing
http://www.easyhomeorganizing.com/
-
Sink to their level. Get
on your knees in their room to view things from a kid's
level. Convenience is an important
factor in getting anyone to organize or put things away.
Lower clothing racks in the closet. Put most frequently
used items on the lowest shelves and in the lowest drawers.
Set up decorative, short open
bins, crates,
baskets and boxes in corners, on closet floors and at the
foot of
the bed.
-
Hide stuff under the bed.
Use flat,
rectangular storage bins on wheels that are made for under-the-bed
storage. Designate one of these for Barbie dolls and another
for mini toy cars. Store your children's artwork
including construction paper and crayons in one of the bins.
Older children can
store schoolwork and notebooks here. Got music lovers? They
can keep a pile of CDs handy here.
-
Make organizing fun.
Organizing can be
a drag even for "big people." Imagine how your child feels at
the thought of clearing away his toys, clothes and school
work. Get your children involved by letting them creatively
label their own drawers and bins. They can make personalized
drawings as labels. Or you can take photos of your child with
an object that goes in the drawer and tape it to the front of
the bin or drawer. Is the drawer supposed to hold small toy
soldiers? Tape a small clear plastic pocket to the outside of
the drawer that's stuffed with an example of the contents
such as one toy soldier. You can buy notebook plastic sleeves
(also called sheet protectors) from any office supply store.
Then just cut them to the size needed. Use clear shipping
tape to attach labels to bins. Put a laundry hamper under a
kid size basketball hoop.
-
Keep
drawers
shallow.
The deeper the
drawer, the more kids will fill it. With a few exceptions for
big bulky items, use shallow drawers. Some narrow storage
carts on wheels come with five or six shallow drawers. You
can roll the cart into the closet if needed or
line several in a row against a wall. Fill deeper drawers with
mini-organizers such as
small trays, tins,
recycled cardboard boxes and more. Don't use lids on the
mini-organizers; that's just a hassle for kids to find their
items and remember to put the lids back on each item. Use
makeshift cardboard dividers to separate things in
drawers--like socks.
-
Color code it.
Buy blue bins for Barbie dolls and red bins for fire trucks.
Put summer clothing on green hangers
and Sunday dress outfits on blue hangers. Or use different
colors for different children. Suzy gets blue bins and
hangers and Sandy gets red bins and hangers.
-
Hang
it.
Your children
might view their collection of self-created artwork in much
the same way as you view your collection of store-bought
artwork. Buy inexpensive frames and hang drawings in a
clustered artistic layout on one wall in your child's room.
It adds a decorative and personalized element. Put up a
cork/bulletin
board for the kids to hang ribbons and medals from field
days, school spirit events and competitions. Another cork
board can be for photos. Or hang a rectangular vertical
homemade fabric organizer with pockets beside the door to
hold photos, souvenir card collections and birthday cards
through the years.
-
Set ground rules.
For example,
before you play another board game, you must first put this board game away.
Before each gift-giving season, you must pick one item to donate to a nonprofit organization; it brings a smile to the face of a child with less
than you. You can only keep things in your room that have a place. So if a
drawer is full and you want to keep something new, you must discard something
from the drawer (for example, an old piece of artwork for a new piece of
artwork or an old broken toy for a new one).
Nationally published freelance writer Karen
Fritscher-Porter
writes about home organizing solutions at EasyHomeOrganizing.com.
Visit
http://www.EasyHomeOrganizing.com to read more than
50 FREE articles containing dozens of home organizing ideas
and solutions. Plus subscribe to the FREE newsletter updating
you about the latest home organization products sold in stores.
|