*Full disclaimer: This playroom 99.9% of the time does not look like this! Usually there is an entire toy box dumped out all over the floor so because it’s actually clean for once, I felt the need to have a toy storage post.*

When Nate was almost a year old, my mom and stepdad moved about 20-25 minutes away from us, to a quaint, little town. Kurt and I loved the layout of their new house; they had a large upstairs loft and as soon as we saw it, we began imagining how awesome of a playroom it would make. This was one of the main reasons we decided to buy a lot around the corner from them. We had been contemplating moving because we felt we needed more space and this type of layout seemed like a perfect fit. It allowed us to have our ‘grown up’ family room downstairs and Nate have his own play space upstairs; and to this day, it’s still one of my favourite spaces. It’s large enough that we have ample room for our couches, tv and stand, Nate’s tee-pee, and his mountain of ever growing toys.

When you have kids organization is a must otherwise toys start taking over every inch of space they can get! In our old house, I was convinced that Nate’s toys were multiplying over night. It seemed like every day we were waking up to more and more toys all over our living room floor. We went through several different storage type bins and toy boxes but nothing stood up to our rambunctious and energetic toddler. Anything flimsy or able to be folded up, never lasted more than two weeks with Nate. After searching and searching, we finally found an amazing storage trunk that we knew could withstand anything Nate through at it. We were able to fill it with a couple small cubes for his cars, trains, trucks, and tracks and still had space left over for his larger toys; making clean up after a long day of playing just that much more easier! Of course, Nate does have his favourite toys so we tend to leave those out all the time but as long as they aren’t just thrown all over the floor, I’m cool with that.

Even with how awesome that storage trunk is, Nate still has some rather LARGE toys that just would not fit in that trunk no matter how much we wanted them to so in order to appease my need and want for storage space, Kurt built this amazing toy box with his own two hands! I was so proud when he built this because it’s HUGE and I’ve never seen him actually build anything before in the years we’ve known one another so it was pretty cool to see him using these skills that I never knew he had; plus Nate loves all the Cars decals Kurt put on it!

Of course, there’s always those toys that even the largest of toy boxes can’t hold but even though these are still technically ‘out in the open’, I love that they tuck in so nicely beside Nate’s tee-pee and although they aren’t right beside all his other toys, he still plays with them almost daily. Organization is the key to any household (in my opinion) and even if our playroom only looks like these pictures for 30 minutes a day, I’ll take it!

Exactly 25 minutes after I took the first photos…