Simplifying a Kids Bedroom: The Before

Many years ago as I prepared to become a mother, I had a list of lofty ideals about the kind of mother I would be. In my mid-twenties, I adopted a minimalist lifestyle and I wished to incorporate those ideals in motherhood.

I fell in love with the clean, practical, heart-centered principles of the Montessori and Waldorf methods. I sought to create clean, colorful, natural living and play spaces for my children. I wanted them to have a minimal amount of toys and I wanted the toys that they did have to be made of natural materials. I sought to avoid toys that were cheap-quality, made from plastic, noise-making, flashing, and quickly outgrown.

Unfortunately, as they say, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.” My intentions were good, but in less than 3 years as a mother, my idealist vision had turned to ash. Soon, my kids bedroom and play spaces were overflowing with the kinds of toys that I had hoped to avoid. I quickly learned that other people did not have the same vision for my children’s toys that I had. In a matter of just a few holidays and birthdays, my tidy, natural, minimalist vision could was shattered.

Eventually I took more extreme measures. I saved gift receipts and exchanged toys for things like clothing, shoes, or books. That worked for a little while, but things always got out of hand again. Often I was as guilty for the accumulation as anyone else. Roman would get stuck on a particular brand, for example Imaginext, and I would give into his requests until one day we had so many Imaginext toys that we could open our own shop.

Much of the accumulation happened during difficult times (separation, divorce, moving house 3 times in less than 2 years) and there were plenty of those for us. I stopped paying attention or I simply didn’t care because I was too busy putting out fires in my personal life.

Things finally came to a head a little over a year ago when our family expanded. We went from being a family of 3, to a blended family of 6. What was once Roman and Marina’s playroom would become Jaden and Eliana’s bedroom. I had no choice but to confront the reality of what was lurking in there. All told, in the last year or so, I have donated or tossed about 8 large garbage bags of toys.

Considering everything that I have purged is alarming–the amount of waste, the impact on the environment that the production of those toys had, the space that they will take up in a landfill. It breaks my heart. The toys and the kids bedroom is only one piece of the puzzle. I accumulated in other areas, too. These past couple of years of my life have been a rebuilding in so many ways. One of the things that I am most grateful for is finding my way back to a desire for minimalism. The changes that I have in store for this bedroom will lead the way for many other transformations within our home.

Although I have already purged so much in there, there are still way too many toys in there as you can sense from the pictures in this post. I have purged most of what I wanted to–things they have outgrown, things that were broken, etc. So the next phase of this project will be implementing a rotation system.

The fact is that kids, like adults, get overwhelmed when there are too many options. This is where rotating comes into play. My plan is to store away 50% of their toys in bins at any given time. I will keep those toys stored away for about a month, then I will rotate again. When the stored toys come back out, their novelty will be restored. Also, by taking what you see in these pictures and cutting it in half, the children will have less options–and less overwhelm–which hopefully will lead to more creative and inspired play.

Honestly, I don’t know how all of this will work out. I have heard wonderful things about this method and in theory it makes good sense to me. I actually use this method for our books already. I rotate them out on a seasonal basis and it works really well. But only time will tell how this will work on a bigger scale with all of their toys. We’ll see!

Finally, I want to note that these pictures were taken after 2 hours of cleaning and organizing the room. On an average day, it is not this tidy (can you call this tidy!?) in there. But, again, this is the “before.” I’ll be back in a couple of months with the “after,” as well as an update about how the entire process works out for us.