With Christmas coming up and space in our house limited I’ve been having a bit of a toy overhaul over the last couple of weeks, taking a look at how to effectively store them as well as selling, donating and bagging some up to put in the loft for when William is old enough to play with them.

*This post contains gifted items & affiliate links*

We recently rearranged the children’s bedroom to make way for William’s cot which meant Florence has now moved over into the IKEA Kura bed. We’ve got it on the high sleeper setting so we can make the most of the space available in the box room. Underneath I have an Argos Home storage cube unit which holds 6 boxes.

I ordered these bright coloured boxes (affiliate link) to fit the rainbow theme of their bedroom and they are the ideal way to keep their bedroom tidy while looking like part of the decor too. They’re big enough to hold loads of toys and lightweight enough for even William to pull out and delve into.

Above the boxes I use the three cubbies for books and themed toys. With it coming up to Hallowe’en I’ve got a little Witch themed cube and then an Autumn one the other side. These make for super quick and accessible on theme play solutions. 

The one thing that drives me absolutely potty about the kids toys is that no matter how many times I’d put everything in their right boxes, they’d be mixed up within a day! Plus I needed a way to separate all of the little play sets we have to keep them together and not lose any of the pieces. My cousin recently set up her new online business, Bits by Bee, selling personalised items for all and when I was thinking about how to get things a bit more organised I had a bit of a brain wave. I needed little bags which could hold each set of toys that could then simply be placed into one of the boxes once filled, meaning everything would stay organised but I’d still be able to maximise the use of the boxes!

I dropped her a message with the idea and she was happy to help. I had a list of the play sets and toys that I wanted bags for and she went ahead and designed pictures of each of them to print onto each bag, all in different rainbow colours as well as adding the name of each one too.

The bags themselves are exactly what I wanted them to be. They’re drawstring so they’re easy for Florence (and eventually William) to open and close, the designs on the front are bright and clear and with the variety of sizes on offer they’re perfect for holding all sorts of toys and play sets, big or small.

Now whenever we want to grab a toy out of the toy boxes, we know exactly where to find it and it makes putting stuff away so much easier! 

These bags have made such a difference to our toy storage upstairs that I’ve since ordered a whole load more for our downstairs toys. They’re extremely reasonably priced (from just £2.50) and I couldn’t recommend them enough.

Another thing I find a bit of a nightmare to store is cuddly toys and over the last 2.5 years we seem to have built up quite a collection. Until recently they’ve been taking up a heap of room in an unsightly over filled laundry basket but when I was searching on Pinterest for some toy storage ideas for small rooms, this over door shoe hanger hack looked perfect. I bought this one  on Amazon (affiliate link) which has 24 different pockets and it has made such a difference to the amount of floor space. Plus now Florence can actually see & access them without having to rummage through.  

When it comes to games and puzzles, all of ours so far have been stored under the cot in the nursery but this just made them really difficult to get to and meant that Florence rarely asked to play with them. I’ve bought them out and stored them on one of our box units and we get so much more use of them now. I used to really struggles to store our peg puzzles as the bits always fall out and then get lost so again, they just got bunged in a box and put under the cot. Now though I use these plastic file envelopes to keep them in and they work so well!

I feel so much better when the toys are more organised when the children’s toys are all in the right place and it makes putting together play activities so much quicker & easier.

JUST SO YOU KNOW…

I was gifted a set of personalised toy storage bags from Bits by Bee in exchange for an honest review. I’m a member of Amazon associates  and receive a small percentage of the cost of products purchased as a result of the amazon links in this post.

After a particularly miserable week plagued with illness here I was determined that this weekend would be filled with memory making and quality family time to end a rather lovely summer.

The first weekend of September was always marked off in our calendar before we had babies. From the very first year Sean and I got together it became a bit of a tradition that we’d spend the day at The annual Hops & Harvest festival at Kent Life.

This year, for the first time since we had the children, we attended the festival as a family and met up with Sean’s Dad & my best friends and William’s God parents. 

There were over 20 different beers, ciders & ales on offer in the beer tent which the others sampled at leisure while I sipped on a glass of Pimms. Though there were lots of food stalls there, We took a picnic of sandwiches & Jaffa cakes & cocktail sausages – all Florence’s favourite lunch snacks.

We spent the afternoon relaxing and chatting and playing in the sunshine to the sound of the live bands playing on the main stage. Florence talked Auntie Issie into blowing bubbles and they were at it for ages while William lapped up all the attention from Uncle Charlie.

Once we had eaten all of our lunch and blown the last of the bubbles we headed to explore the rest of the farm. We painted a pig in the paint-a-pot shed and headed off to feed the animals while it dried. The cheeky goats ate all the animal food AND the paper bag! Florence thought it was very funny and very cheeky!

After a quick visit to the ‘piggies’ and ponies we went to say hello to the rabbits & guinea pigs. According to Florence They were ‘soooo cute!’.

It was nearly time to go home as by now everyone was getting a bit tired – especially William as he’d skipped his afternoon nap because he was too interested in everything going on around him but We couldn’t leave before having a bounce on the bouncy castle. Thankfully, it’s not timed or charged or anything as it’s all included in the entry fee to the farm, because Florence would have stayed on there all evening If she could have! We ended up having to bribe her with ice cream to get her off and took a wander back to the car via the ice cream hut. By the time we reached the car William had finally given in and fallen sound asleep and it wasn’t long before Florence nodded off on the way home too.

It was such a lovely day spent with our friends and the perfect end to a fun filled summer. We are very much looking forward to returning to Kent Life in October for more family fun at their Hallowe’en festivities.

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