How to Organize a Kids Room

Hello!  My name is Wendy and I am so excited to be here at Ask Anna as a contributor about my favorite topic: Organization!  I blog over at Pretty Well Organized about organization, design and overall home management.  I work full time in addition to blogging, am married with one very energetic two year old daughter, all of which makes keeping an organized home a top priority.

Today I will be sharing how to organize a kids closet…without a closet.  We have been in the process of moving our daughter into a “big girl” room down the hall from her nursery.  The new room is larger {a plus!} but has no closet {bad news bears!}.  This has given us both a blessing in the extra play space but also a challenge in creating smart storage for her clothes and toys.  Her room looks a little something like this:

As you can see, we are blessed with a sizable space for a kiddo room.  The room is about 12′ x 16′. The room has no closet AND a slanted ceiling along the right side wall.  Double whammy!

When I was first planning out her room, I knew I wanted to coordinate furniture from her nursery so that down the line we would be able to mix and match the pieces between the two rooms.  For the short wall under the slanted ceiling, I went with the Cameron Storage collection from Pottery Barn Kids.  The collection is made of a wide range of options and I selected a configuration that had doors to hide some of my girl’s toys and books.  I also picked out coordinating baskets and had the basket liners embroidered to help her to know where to put her favorite things.  So far this has been working great because it allows her to not only pick up after herself easier, but also to start gaining some traction in word recognition.

I also opted for an armoire which helps not only with hanging clothes storage {like all those frilly dresses my daughter loves} but also gave us 2 additional drawers and a cabinet below for toys.  I love the functionality of having a place to tuck away bigger toys so they are out of sight and out of mind!   In the top cabinet of the armoire, I inserted the clothing rod which came with the armoire.  There was also the option of using shelving throughout, but I wanted to be able to hang some key items in her closet, like church clothes.  The two small drawers became great storage for skirts and for accessories {hats, sunglasses, headbands, etc.}.  The bottom cabinets are used to hold larger toys that don’t fit well in the storage cabinets.

 {via}

To manage clothing, the obvious answer was to purchase a very large dresser.  I opted for the Larkin Extra-Wide Dresser which matched the rest of my daughter’s set.  It has EIGHT drawers which made for lots of wonderful space to store clothes.  The challenge with a dresser of that size is that my daughter’s clothes are still small.  She’s two and a half and so I needed some way to keep the drawers organized.  The first thing I did was determine what items would go in each drawer:

In the drawer above “outfits for the week” I used small square drawer organizers from The Container Store and added my own labels using simple scrapbook paper and a silver plate from Martha Stewart to mark the organizers for each day my daughter attends school. I also added one extra square for “jammies”.  Each Sunday we sort out her laundry and put together an outfit for each day of the week in her drawer:

So far, this system for organizing our school outfits has worked great!  If a two-year old can follow the organization system, it’s a winner in my book!  Here are a few other images of what her drawers turned out like:

As you can see, I did not DIY much in this space.  I made my own labels for her clothing items and purchased a lot of the furniture and drawer organizers.  The reason being that I am planning to DIY the art work for her room.  If you’d like, you can follow along on my blog as I share the progress in decorating her space.

In summary, a few things to keep in mind when organizing a kids room:

1.) Make it simple.  The less complex it is the more likely your kiddos are to stick to it.

2.) Make it accessible.  If they can’t reach it they won’t use it…or worse, they’ll climb to get to it.

3.) Label label label.  This way you’re less likely to find socks in 12 different drawers.

So far, this system has worked well for us.  I hope this gives you a few ideas when it comes to tackling a tough storage problem!  See you next month!

Wendy