February 2024
One of my goals as a parent is to not let my anxiety around chaotic spaces interfere with my child’s enjoyment of toys. I mitigate that anxiety by rotating toys, but I struggle with toy hideouts when they are out of rotation. This led me to add a high storage option.
(This was an extension of the Playroom Refresh from December, view it here!)
There are a couple of reasons that this option worked for us.
First, The playroom is in the back of the house, so these are mostly out-of-sight unless you are sitting in the room specifically.
Secondly, and this was more of a happy accident, most toys were less than 13 inches tall – conveniently the amount of room available.
Mental Health Takeaway
Most parents put a lot of intention around what their kids play with. An assortment of colors, shapes, textures, and depending on your personal preference, limited lights and sounds.
Your family and friends however, will likely only contemplate the quality of toy for about 2 minutes while standing in the toy aisle prior to the kids birthday party. Done with zero consideration of size, sound, or number of pieces.
To be clear, our children appreciate this spontaneity of present purchasing! As parents however, learning to live with clutter can be a big thwack to the chaos department of our brains.
Tl;dr The correlation between mental health and the number of scattered toys in life is not coincidental.
Step 1. Measure and Plan
This was the final piece of our playroom puzzle, and such a simple one.
I started by measuring the full length of the room and was excited to have about 16 feet to work with.
I flip-flopped between two options.
Option A: Buy one 12 ft board for a continuous shelf space. It would leave some unused space, but I wouldn’t have a ‘seam’ in the middle.
Option B: Use two 8 ft boards. This would allow me to go wall to wall and give the most storage space.
Feeling overwhelmed by how much high storage space I would need, I opted for the biggest coverage.
Step 2. Prep, Sand and Paint.
I picked up two 8 ft. boards, sanded them down with 120 grit and dusted them off.
I know that I’ll be using simple white brackets, and wanted to keep the color simple. Instead I opted for just a clear coat.
I had a water-based polyurethane left over from a past project, which has held up great on other shelves. It worked great here too!
I don’t expect too much wear and tear (fingers crossed) so I only added 1 coat.
Step 3. Measure & Mount
Something fun about this playroom is that it was not originally part of the house.
I can’t say who may have been responsible, but encourages me to exercise caution when drilling into the drywall.
It was more important to me to mount each bracket to a stud than worrying about them being perfectly even.
We also used L-shaped brackets mounted upward to give as much high storage as possible.
I laid the boards down and after considering what would give the best balance I chose to cut just under 9″ off each board.
This allows for about 3″ on either side of the shelf, and a little space between both boards once mounted.
I feared that after laying the board across the brackets, I was going to step back and see how un-level this room actually was.
Luckily, this was not the case!
Step 4. Clean, Organize & Store.
I spent some time searching Amazon to find baskets that were durable, opaque, and able to take up as much height as I had on the shelf.
I played scenarios over in my mind of little dude being able to see all the toys that were out of reach and the nightmare that would be.
After internet digging, I found these off-white baskets that were sturdy enough to fill with toys, and tall enough to cover most of the storage shelf area.
Lastly, I waited until little dude was at school and moved all toys to the playroom. I made some quick decisions and filled baskets with toys that were getting a well-deserved break.
Question for parents: when do we come to terms with not needing to find every little piece of each toy?
Personally, I still go crazy trying to find every car, block, wooden fish and piece of fake pasta.
Now when we think about needing some new fun things, we take down a basket, empty out the new toys, fill it up with ‘old’ toys and move on with our busy days.