Basket love: toy shelf

I LOVE improving little areas in our home!  Check out the progression of our upstairs toy shelf:



There was nothing really wrong with this shelf, except that I wasn’t able to get as much onto it as I wanted.  The main level is where we play the most, and I wanted to be able to have more for them to play with, without taking up much more space. 


Easy solution: baskets!

First, I put all of the board books in a basket and had them facing out, maximizing the space and leaving more room for picture books.



The next issue were these two cute sets we had gotten our 3-year-old for Christmas.  They looked very cute in the boxes, but to putting them away was a job and the boxes weren’t practical.


Another basket, of course!  Now, we just dump all of the wooden food into this big basket.  It’s easy to clean up and looks much simpler on the shelf.


This looked great – just fine, BUT we still had more things that I needed to fit on the shelf.  We needed a bigger basket.


Even though they love playing with it all the time, I ended up moving the basket of food downstairs into the girls’ play kitchen and dumped all of the extra toys into one big basket across the bottom shelf.  Now we have a lot more for the girls to play with but it all looks a lot simpler with the baskets in place. 


A few accessories and a project organizer on top and it’s ready for playtime!