So, here is my current dilemma with many small children. What to do with the toys. As moms with lots of kids the toys do seem to multiply like crazy and I purge, but really, I can't take away all their treasures!! So we lean more toward mess management than total containment. ;)

I have a neighbor/friend with 5 kiddos and she keeps the toys in the children's rooms with just family games and art supplies in the downstairs closet. Her downstairs always seems to be tidy. I have attempted to do this by turning my hall closet into the family games, craft supplies, homeschool manipulatives closet. We have a family room/homeschool room/playroom downstairs and the house rule is the toys don't leave the carpet (it's our only carpeted room downstairs). (yeah right) The toys we have downstairs are the playstands, play kitchen with accessories, blocks, music toys and cars/car toys (tried to keep it things everyone can play with/open ended play type of toys.)

Somehow she has also trained her children to respect what are upstairs toys and what are downstairs toys. Now I am trying to do this but daily I have a bucket full of toys that go back upstairs between barbies, horses and dolly accessories and weekly when I purge the bedrooms I have buckets full that go downstairs including crayons, counting bears, coloring pages, blah blah blah (despite house rule that there are no crayons upstairs, a busy mama often misses such things being snuck up the stairs). So, mama needs to be more vigilent about this but I am a softy and think I don't want to limit their creativity by not allowing ponies downstairs. YKWIM.

So that's us in a walnutshell. How do you handle the toys? What are your house rules to help manage them?

We have a den which is used as a playroom in our current house. I allow one basket of board books and one basket of baby toys in the living room and that is it. The rest of the toys have to stay in their bedrooms or in the playroom. I hate stepping on or over toys all day so this helps me. Plus it is nice that when people come over they don't trip when they come in the door.

We have a basement playroom and then toys in the kids rooms as well. They have to stay there. Now, they may bring something to the living room or den to play with it, but it must be put away when they are done. Otherwise, we just have books in the main living area. I got tired of stepping on toys and just having general chaos in the main living areas. This system has worked for us. One of the kids' daily chores is to pick up their rooms before supper, so in theory, the rooms are in decent order. The basement is usually messier than I would like, but other than the kids' playing down there, it is used primarily for storage, so I don't have to look at it 95% of the time.

you won't limit creativity by setting some guidelines for where the toys are appropriate. ;) YOU live there, too, and need to feel comfortable.

Right now we are in about 1200 sq ft - and I do not allow much in the living areas of the house. First off, it's where we do our 'work' (homeschool) and toys tend to distract. Second, it's where we spend our family time - and frankly, I am NOT happy when I step on a train track or Barbie.

The kids have cubbies in their rooms where the toys have homes. Larger sets of toys (like the unteen million K'Nex and Magnetix) have homes in larger Rubbermaid bins that either slide under beds or in the closet.

Downstairs I have a couple of 'ok' toys. I babysit once in a while, so these are things that the other kids are allowed to play with. I have a 9 hole cubby downstairs. 3 cubbies hold games, 2 hold puzzles of all shapes and sizes, 1 holds a container of crayons and coloring books/papers, then on the bottom row I have three cubby boxes. 1 has some blocks, 1 has playdough, and the last one has the Mr. Potato Head.

I feel comfortable with the way we keep things now. I like not having every toy in the house under foot. Of course, I don't have toddlers anymore - so my kids can all play in their bedrooms. But there really isn't any 'play' room in the living areas of this house.

bumping this because I have been decluttering/reorganizing again and it's really getting to me! I feel like I am just re-arranging clutter. I have gotten rid of A LOT and it still is bugging me. We don't have a basement playroom, I think that's so great for families that do. We have a main floor family room that is open to our eat in kitchen (open concept). Other side of the house (traditional four-room colonial) is living room dining room combo. I think I have to get rid of more. The scary thing is we know plenty of families with MORE toys than we have with not nearly the number of kids.

I need help with this too. I have been decluttering like mad but we still have too much. I need to find some sort of system that works because I spend half of my day picking up toys or reminding the kids to pick up their toys.(first one seems to work better than the second :vent: )

We have the room for an extra playroom now but that hasn't always been an option. Do you use both your family room and living room? If not that I would transform one of those into a playroom. When we lived in an apartment we made one bedroom a playroom. It helps us to have an area where we can put things away and sometimes even just shut the door so we don't have to see the mess.

If you can't make a playroom, then I would suggest limiting and rotating toys. Maybe keep one main toy in their bedrooms and put the rest away. We currently have playmobil and fisher price castle set in one bedroom and in the other there are playmobil and legos and that is all. The playroom has larger toys (air hockey table, espn sports center, train table) then their is one bin of dinos and one of deigo toys. The other toys are stored away.