transformation month

Before and After: This $100 Storage Closet Makeover Comes with So Many Organization Lessons

updated Sep 23, 2019
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September is Transformation Month at Apartment Therapy! That means every day, we’re sharing a new before & after to show the power of transformations at home. Head over here to see them all!

If you have kids at home, you know that cleaning up toys is a struggle.

Leanna Laming acknowledges that her family’s toy closet was better looking than many, but it definitely had some room for improvement. In particular, while toy types were arranged by bin, those bins were completely opaque and didn’t have labels. “I wanted a play closet where my kids could easily find the toy that they were looking for,” Leanna writes. “It was also important to me to label each bin so they could help put toys away in the right places.”

Over the course of four or five hours, Leanna removed everything from the closet, then sorted the toys into “garbage,” “donate,” and “keep” piles. She organized the “keep” toys by category (blocks, cars, and so on). Then, she hit the stores, purchasing a boatload of storage bins for roughly $100. “I made sure to get lids for small toys that could be choking hazards or that would easily get misplaced,” she writes.

Leanna and her little ones are such fans of the result. “I love that my kids can see their toys! They are also now playing with toys that they forgot they had,” she writes. A bonus: Leanna says she rotates which bins are on which shelves so her kids can access different toys by themselves.

Leanna’s advice to anyone else tackling toy organization: “Involve your kids when selecting which toys to donate to others who are less fortunate,” she writes. “It is a great way to teach them about donating to those in need!”

Thank you for sharing, Leanna!