Play Room

We are lucky to live in a house that has plenty of extra space downstairs for our young family.  We have a lounge, dining room, conservatory & also a funny little room that is currently being used as a "play room".  I call it a funny little room because it is like an extension of the hallway as it sits between the dining room & the kitchen.  It is a through-room but is big enough to hold our old (small) dining table & chairs & the Ikea Billy bookcases that were previously in the living room at our old house.  We are currently keeping a lot of the girls' toys, craft stuff & games on the shelves & are trying to encourage them to do their drawing, painting & play doh etc out on this table to prevent the mess from spreading through the rest of the house.

Anyway, I find myself getting very frustrated with the mess that accumulates on the shelves.  My girls are not very good at tidying up & they just shoved stuff on the shelves so that it was all off the table.

I did have 2 pink plastic crates that housed their mega bloks & also the collection of little people, cars, animals etc that they play with.  These sat on the bottom 2 shelves but were a bit too big really so kept getting knocked off.  Also, they haven't really proven to be very sturdy over the past couple of years as they have been very easy to break - I started off with 6 crates!!!

We went to JTF last week & I saw some slightly smaller, lidded crates for sale at £18 for 5, which I didn't think was too horrendous.  After a little bit of sorting the shelves look better:

It's still a work in progress as the crates are a bit big for the smaller bookcase but this room is next on our to-decorate list once the dining room is finished so we'll be looking at better solutions then.

Here's is what I have put in the crates:

1. Mega bloks
2. Little people, cars, animals, fences etc
3. Small houses, stables etc
4. Paper, pencils, crayons etc
5. Play doh pots, cutters etc

We'll see how long it stays organised like this for!!!

xxx