One of my goals for the year is to keep our house cleaner. In the next few months I will be organizing our entire home. We are a family of 4 living in a 2 bedroom (925 sq. ft) apartment. Needless to say there is not any “extra” space, and it is quite the challenge to keep everything clean, organized and childproof at the same time! We have just made the decision to stay in our apartment for at least another year and a half while we save for a house, so I’m getting serious about going through everything, organizing it all, getting rid of what we don’t need, and making things that we do need more easily accessible.
My project this week was Little Man’s room. At the begining of the week I talked a little bit about how I don’t clean his room enough. It just hasn’t been at the top of my priority list, but he’s getting to the age, that I really want to start teaching him to clean up after himself and take care of his things. I have been setting a poor example by letting his room be such a disaster zone, but it is hard to keep up with it, when he doesn’t have good places to keep his toys.
In the past I would clean his room maybe once a month or so and he might or might not help me. Our new system is for him to help clean up his toys every night before bed. I plan on having him clean up his things from either his room or the living room before hubby comes home from work, that way he still has some toys out in one room to play with his Dada. Then, just before bed we can help him tackle whichever room was not picked up before hubby came home. This system has been working great the last 2 nights. He’s starting to catch on to the concept of cleaning up toys after he’s done with them and “cleaning as he goes”, so that helps a lot.
Today I’m sharing the ‘before’ pictures of Little Man’s room and I will be pointing out various problems that we had with his room the way it was before. Part 2 will be the “after” pictures of his newly organized and freshly decorated room!
So this is what his room would typically look like, toys and stuffed animals EVERYWHERE. I had a shelf & bins for his room, but I ended up taking the shelf part out because he liked to use it to bang on the wall. I want his room to be 100% childproof, meaning there is nothing in there that he can get in trouble for doing, so for now, that means the shelf has to go! My son is one that would bang it against the wall just to get me to come in there and tell him “no”, so it’s not worth the battle/lesson at this point, but it did raise a challenge for room/toy organization!
There’s no excuse. Really, this is just sad. The drawers of his dresser aren’t even shut. sigh. You can see the toy bins that I have in there for smaller toys, but I don’t have anything that works for his stuffed animals or books, so it all just ends up being a big mess.
My Little Man is quite the book worm. He loves reading and has a lot of books. I had problems finding a good place to keep them all. I used to keep them in small boxes, but the books outgrew the boxes, and he wasn’t able to keep them neat, and also have access to them/ be able to dig through and find a specific book that he wanted to read.
There is so much in this photo to point out. The crib is blocking the closet doors in order to childproof the room. I don’t want him to be able to open those doors or mess with them, because he could easily break them or the mirrors and hurt himself. The crib going in front of them works perfectly for that, and serves as extra storage space for boxes of unused baby clothes. win-win since the princess sleeps in a pack-n-play in the master bedroom, she isn’t using the crib and probably never will.
The problem with this set up is that I’ve caught Little Man inside the crib a time or two. Meaning he climbs onto the end posts of his bed from there climbs over into the crib. This is unsafe on so many levels, because he could fall and hit his head on the wooden bed, or the crib could break and hit him etc. etc. Because of that, one of the first things I did when I redid his room was move his bed to the other side of the room so he can’t use it to climb in the crib anymore ;) yay for a 100% childproof room!
Speaking of child-proofing! We’ve recently had to put tape over his light switch so that he won’t keep turning his light on himself after we put him to bed. He figured out that if he gets one of his longer toys he can use that to flip the switch. A little tape over the light switch does the trick! ;)
So those are our “before” pictures, and all the little “issues”/problems we had to fix. I can’t wait to share the “after” pictures with you! I’m so excited to have his room organized and cleaned is such a way that he can help maintain it! And he is beyond thrilled with the decor! *pictures coming soon*
How do you keep your kids’ stuff organized? Do you have any tips? or are you looking for some inspiration yourself?
Ashley Ditto says
Awesome pictures! Good work!
Gabrielle says
I can’t wait to see the finished results! My son used to turn the lights off and on too, since the switch is near his crib, but eventually, the novelty wore off and he stopped.
Risa says
If you come up with any really good ideas let me know. We live in an apartment a little bigger than yours with a 2 month old and a 6 year old.
Shell says
The whole time I was reading this, I was thinking about how much cleaning I need to do. Sigh.
Diana @ Nanny2Mommy says
Hey Hun! Thanks for hopping by Thumping Thursdays Blog Hop! Our hop is where you link up your main blog URL, hop around to make some new friends, and hopefully become the Featured Read if you follow all the rules.
Thanks again!