(I was enjoying a late-night carrot snack as I was sitting down to write this post. At just the *right* time I sneezed and little carrot pieces went everywhere. No worries. I switched to chocolate so we’re good to go… 
)
I’m continuing to follow along with Simple Mom’s Project: Simplify and I have some progress to show you after dealing with lots of toys around here. The project was off to a pretty good start earlier in the week, fizzled in the middle, and picked back up to a running pace on Saturday.
Here’s a before picture from the living room:
I ended up bringing most of the toys from all around the house to the living room so that we could really see what we had. While I was searching for toys I found a sad discovery. These bags:
One bag was a bag from when I decluttered toys over a year ago. Yup. Still there. And the other 2 bags were from a “stage” I went through where I told my kids that if they didn’t pick up their toys, I would pack them up in trash bags and they couldn’t play with them for a long time. Something like that, anyway. It wasn’t a good solution, in case you are wondering. They were too young and I hadn’t taught them how to clean up their toys very well.
So I decided to dump 2 of the bags in the living room along with all the other toys that were gathering there to sort:
So we sorted and played and sorted some more so that like things were together.
We did some decluttering as we went, but we also looked at all the toys that we had and talked about giving away the ones they didn’t play with very much. I thought the kids did pretty well with that.
Here’s the give stuff:
And here’s the living room after we put most of the rest of the toys in the basement/family room/playroom:
Here’s a before from the basement:
The after pictures from the basement are a little strange because we just got a new TV and cabinet(both used), but we haven’t sold or donated the old one yet. So here ya go:
The toy organizer is in the kitchen for right now:
Here are some toys on basement shelves. I’m thinking I’ll rotate toys through here maybe a couple times a month:
Just so you know, we are not finished with this! But we did make great progress! Some things that still need to be decluttered: dress up chest, kids books, arts & crafts stuff, DVD’s/videos, and misc. toys from under furniture and in random nooks and crannies.
Below is the other side of the playroom. I think it looks worse than it is because all those DVD’s and videos were taken out of their storage under the TV and other things were moved around to have room to bring in the new TV/cabinet, so as soon as we get rid of the old TV/cabinet, we can finish this room:
I’ll leave you with this organized picture:
If you want to see more kids’ toys (and clothes) before and after pictures, head over to Simple Mom’s link up!
