Hello friends!  Today I am sharing a different kind of post.  Instead of showing a beautiful craft, a cool DIY tutorial, or a dramatic room reveal, today I am going to talk to you about PROBLEMS IN THE PLAYROOM.  Yep, blog land isn't always full of roses and butterflies.  The truth is, bloggers have messy rooms and storage problems, just like many of you.  And our messy room with storage problems is currently our twin girls' playroom.

Now, before I jump right into it, let me note that YES, I know we are very, very, very blessed to have a dedicated playroom.  Truly, I do.  This is the first house we have owned with enough space to have a dedicated playroom.  We are blessed to have as much as we do, and I believe strongly that we should take care of all we have.  To me, that means we should teach our girls to clean their playroom every day and I believe the easiest way to do that is to give everything a dedicated “place to live.”

When we finished the playroom for our girls, they were almost 3 and most of their toys were big so that they couldn't swallow anything or stick anything up their noses.  So, the storage we had in their playroom at that time was perfect.  You can read all about the playroom reveal here, and here is a reminder of what it looked like back then.

Well, a few weeks after those lovely photos of their tidy and organized playroom were taken, Christmas happened.  Toys.  Lots of toys and dress up clothes suddenly appeared in our house.  Within days they turned 3 and a couple of weeks later we had a birthday party for them.  As much as you tell friends not to bring 2 gifts because they are twins and share everything, all of our generous friends and family brought 2 gifts.  MORE TOYS.  We rearranged and managed to control the clutter.

Fast forward a year to another Christmas and another birthday and we found ourselves with even more stuff.  MORE TOYS AND MORE DRESS UP CLOTHES.  But this time around we found that the toys were smaller and different than things we had needed to store in the past.  So lately, this is what our playroom has looked like.  CRINGE.  {I am partly cringing because of the mess and partly because of the terribly iPhone photos}.

Do you see that random pile of stuff by the grill?  The pile includes books, lego sets, etc. that NEED SOMEWHERE TO LIVE!

Yes, friends.  Our girls' play clothes are currently hanging on 3M command hooks.  It gets the job done, but it isn't very pretty.  And those rain gutter book shelves were PERFECT when the girls were younger, but now we need more book storage.

Ummmm, yikes.  Do you SEE what's happening in this once tidy room?  We don't have places to put things!  For example, in the photo directly above, do you see that stack of puzzles to the left of the door frame.  Yeah, we need somewhere to put those.  And do you see the stuffed animals that are overflowing the baskets?  {PS- I am ashamed to say that we have already purged many stuffed animals and STILL have that many left}.

We LOVE our Trofast storage system from Ikea, but this is what most of the bins look like.  They are crammed full of stuff, which makes them less than functional because our girls' have to empty the entire bin/drawer to find what they are looking for.  That equals a mess.

So, now let's talk GOALS, shall we.  In the coming month, I hope to get this playroom back to it's former state of tidiness!  This means we will need to:

1. PURGE what the girls are no longer using.
2. Create more vertical storage.  We have actually already tackled part of this by building industrial bookshelves.  That tutorial will be shared on my blog in June.  We also want to come up with a vertical storage solution for the stuffed animals.  Still brainstorming that one.
3. Create some movable storage.  We are currently working on building a movable Lego table that is going to be awesome.  Tutorial coming soon!
4. Create a more attractive storage option for the dress-up clothes.  I have a few ideas for this.  Ideally, we will have hanging storage as well as storage for their dress-up shoes all in one option.
5. Find better storage options for all the teeny, tiny toys.  You just cannot effectively store Polly Pockets and their teeny, tiny shoes in a large bin.  I need to find some better options so that we don't loose everything!
6. Stain our Ikea Trofast cabinets a darker color.  The light, pine cabinets worked in our last house, but we want a darker stain to better go with the flow of our new house, so we will be tackling that project as well.

I'll keep you updated with our progress and in a month or so, I should have an updated playroom reveal up on the blog!

In the meantime, if you have any fabulous storage tips/solutions, PLEASE send them my way!