In this post: Kids rooms can get messy very quickly. Sometimes it seems that the mess appears the second you leave the room. To fix this, here are 4 excellent tips for organizing kids rooms.
Organizing kids rooms can feel like an overwhelming task from the outset. But you can totally do it – and in the process make your home life so much easier!
4 Tips for Organizing Kids Rooms
At the original time of writing this post, we were working on making over the room our two daughters shared. 
Anyway, the makeover was desperately needed – partly because the room was dark and dreary and partly because there was nowhere near enough storage for two growing girls.
And the room was always a mess. Like always.
But afterwards, it was so much more functional!
In the process we learned a few things about making a space well-organized for kids of all ages. Here are our top four tips:
1. Contain and Corral
The key to helping kids (and adults alike) learn to put things away and avoid clutter, is to give them a place to store everything. And I do mean everything – from the largest stuffed animal down to the tiniest piece of Lego.
When all a child’s belongings have a “home”, it’s so much easier for them to put it away when they’re finished. Even if they sometimes need a reminder to actually put it away.
2. Organize from the bottom up
Kids are obviously shorter than adults, so they tend to notice things that are much lower. This can actually aid in the process of maintaining a tidy space.
Keep often used items at eye level and lower.
Store infrequently used things like memorabilia or seasonal clothing up high where it doesn’t need to be accessed often.
3. Label, label, label
Labeling bins, baskets and boxes leaves no room for excuses like “but I didn’t know where to put it.”
When our kids were small and couldn’t yet read, I labeled their toy buckets using photos of what was in each bucket. This made it really simple for them to know where to put toys away when it was time to tidy up. When children are older and can read, labels can be changed to words that describe what goes in each bin or basket.
4. Help them maintain
There are two parts to keeping a clutter free home – the big decluttering purge and the maintenance. The maintenance part is where the wheels usually fall off the wagon, so to speak, because everyone talks about the decluttering purge, and teaches how to get your home clutter free. But no one ever talks about the rhythms or routines you need to keep things clutter free.
On of the things that needs to become habit is to do a quick pick up at least once a day, more often is better. You can assign an actual time each day for small cleanups and a time each week to do more of a thorough pick up,. BUT if a time schedule doesn’t work for you, you could do tidy ups that are anchored to certain rhythms each day, like before lunch and before dinner.
If your children are young or their room has gotten particularly disastrous, actual physical help from you can soothe a lot of anxiety and make the chore much more manageable.
But after that, once the organization is in place a child should be able to pick up and tidy on their own. Just make time for it regularly so it’s not a last minute panic before visitors arrive!
Need more kid-related organizing help? Click here for how to organize with kids in the house!
Following these 4 Tips for Organizing Kids Rooms will make tidying any kids room much easier – for you and for them!
Great ideas, especially the contain it all part! We have trouble with that in 2 of the three kids’ rooms, but it makes such a difference. It helps that the big boys basically have only legos to deal with. The big girls have such a variety of stuff that it is hard to corral. The little ones have precious few toys-yay! That makes it so much easier.