Organized Simplicity: Step 2

This is a continuation of our series on Organized Simplicity.

After having cleaned the master bedroom, we set our eyes on the kids' bedroom, which also serves as their play room. This room is one of the rooms that is hardest to keep picked up in the house because the kids have so many toys and things that they like to get out every single day. Sometimes, when an attempt to keep the floor clean by reducing the number of toys available has failed yet again, we wonder if kids just have some psychological need to cover the floor with something, whether it be toys, clean laundry out of the drawers, torn-up bits of paper, dishes from the kitchen... whatever they can find. It's a frustrating room. We're hoping this process will do some good.

We took everything out of the room first and placed it in the carport. We did this while Mr. True was at work, so we didn't move the two pieces of furniture: the monkey bars and the bookshelf.

Mr. True and I made the monkey bars when the oldest Truelet was a toddler. I have never been confident in my upper arm strength, and I would like our kids to be better than I am. I enjoyed the ideas about the potential of babies in the book Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby and, although we don't follow the procedure exactly, I like having the monkey bars and other resources available to us. The monkey bars also provide the structure for hanging the kids' sleeping hammocks (see our hammock post here).

The kids' room consists of a 10' x 10.5' area with a 10' x 2.5' closet. The majority of this closet opens on the room and has a hung sliding door that can only cover one half of the closet at a time. Half of the closet is floor to ceiling shelves (usually open) and the other half is storage space (usually closed). A small portion of the closet space actually opens onto the hallway instead of the kids' room and is intended to be used as a coat closet. We hang a few coats there, but we have put a locking knob on it and most of it is the kids' toy library. They can ask for a toy (or a group of toys - stuffed animals and toy food, for instance) anytime that they have returned the last toy they had out. This is one of those attempts to keep their floor clean that I mentioned above. As I also mentioned, it's not terribly effective. But it does reduce the amount of stuff on the floor, so we stick with it.

The pile of stuff that we removed from the kids' bedroom made a pile about 11.5' long by 8' wide by 2' high, for a total of 184 cubic feet. This was surprisingly less than in the master bedroom, but then, I do go through this room and throw things out on a fairly regular basis. Despite these efforts, we added a decent amount of toys and clothing to the throw away pile.

Once the room was empty, we scrubbed all the crayon off of the walls (which was a bit of a Herculean effort by itself, because it is so difficult to scrub crayon off as it happens). The older two Truelets helped a lot. Though we usually use homemade cleaning products, it was worth it to break out the Magic Erasers to get the kids' walls clean. 

Next we moved all of the useful or beautiful stuff back into the room and placed it back where it belonged. There was a significant amount of stuff in the storage part of the closet that we hadn't thought about in years, but it mostly went back in (baby supplies and canning jars). We pared down our VHS collection, but we didn't get rid of all of it. (I inherited most of the Disney movies on VHS from my grandma and have no intention of paying money to get them on DVD.) In front of that, there is room for a large bookcase full of the kids' books. I like kids' books, but they always end up covering the floor (see above). So the books are in small boxes by first letter of the title (A-C, D-E, etc) and I take out one basket each week and put it where the kids can read the books, then put them back on the shelf and get out a different basket. The alphabetizing means that I can find a particular book when I'm looking for it, while alphabetizing by title means I don't have one box of Dr Seuss and one of Beatrix Potter; the books are spread out so you can find something in each box to match your mood.

The toy library was pared down to Duplos, stuffed animals, dress up clothes, toy food (the toy kitchen belongs in their room but is currently in the kitchen to redirect the youngest Truelet, who loves to "help" cook), dollhouse furniture and dolls (the dollhouse itself also belongs in their room, but they hauled it outside and it hasn't made it back in yet), and my Breyer horses (Mr. True's Legos are stored in another room until the Truelets are a little older). The shelves in the open half of their closet hold clothes in baskets (8 outfits each, plus pajamas, underwear, and church clothes), crayons and a roll of pink builder's paper (a thrift store find that has been wonderful for allowing them to do art without feeling annoyed by how much paper they go through - $5 and it's lasted a year),  and a treasure chest where they can keep a few always-available small toys (matchbox cars and My Little Pony toys at the moment). Some out-of-season clothes are stored on the top shelves. (The clothes were apparently all being washed in the pictures below).

Out in the room, they have the monkey bars with hammocks, a rocking horse, a bucket of books (rotated with the ones in storage), and someday the dollhouse and toy kitchen.

This was an impressive purge and we're happy to have less stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite finished. In the master bedroom, walking in makes me happy and relaxed and filled with a desire to keep it so nice, which makes cleaning up easier. The kids' room just looks bare. Boring. Uninspiring. But I don't want to add stuff, because I like them having as much space as possible to play in. Besides, stuff means that we have to clean under it, and apple cores get stuck and rot, and they pee on it, and... yuck. So what do I do?

I'm still working on this question. I'm not a decorator and this is extremely difficult for me. So far I've bought some vinyl wall stickers to decorate the walls, hoping that will cheer up the room without requiring floor space. I'm also considering rearranging, possibly allowing the hammocks to hang from the monkey bars to the wall instead of along the monkey bars so that one can be left up during the day to use as a seat (our monkey bars are too short and low to allow the hammocks to fully extend, so an adult sitting in one ends up on the ground). I'm still toying with other ideas to make the room more appealing.

Writing these posts is apparently harder than cleaning the house, since it has been a few days since this all happened. Maybe we'll be quicker to report on the next room we finished: the front room.