Tidying up your children’s bedroom seems like an insurmountable task. Every birthday, holiday season, or just a regular weekend when they need distractions equals adding more toys and items to their rooms. Why do they need so many things? However, it’s not insurmountable and in our 9 Tips for Cleaning and Organizing Your Kids’ Bedroom, we’ll delve into ways to overcome it.
I have tried and tested these tips myself. A word of warning, I have a 4 year old and a 1 year old who have different rooms and very different requirements. For this I have focused solely on organizing my 4-year-old daughter’s room because she has many more things… and many more opinions about it. However, no matter how old your child is, tidying up her bedroom will always be a task best tackled if she has a plan, which is where our top tips come into play.
If you need some extra tips on how to deep clean, we’ve got guides on cleaning tools that will cut your cleaning time in half, plus how to clean every room in your home. For now, we will deal with the children’s rooms.
1. Sort
Before I could start thinking about cleaning or organizing my daughter’s bedroom, decluttering was essential. If there are broken toys, they can be recycled, fixed or thrown away. If there are toys, items or clothing that are no longer played with or used, they can be donated or sold. I used a touch of the KonMari method here and gathered all the items in the middle of the room, sorting them by donation, release, sale, or keeping.
To save time (which is always little when there are kids around who want to know what you’re doing), I bagged the leftover items to sort in the evenings or at other times of the day and left everything I had decided on. to keep in the bedroom. Sorting is a key part of the process if you want to stay on top of everything. I recommend decluttering before any big occasion like a birthday, but I think school holidays are also a great opportunity to start fresh.
2. Involve your child
This may seem like a crazy idea, but be careful. When we do tasks like cleaning, like doing the ultimate spring cleaning, we like to do it without our kids because it will get done much faster that way. But, if you want to encourage your child to keep their room tidy after they’ve worked hard, you need to involve them in helping them see where items are kept. Involving your child at some point is beneficial for both of you. If they don’t know where something is once you’ve organized the room, they’re likely to take everything out looking for it. Or maybe they want their room to be done in a certain way that works for them, after all, it is their room and they spend time in it.
I’m not suggesting that you ask your child if he wants to keep things and therefore tidy things up first. If you ask, they’ll probably present compelling arguments for keeping it all. It may be a good idea at some point to involve your child in designing the room or at least showing him the plan so he can see where things live. This brings me to my next tip.
3. Designate spaces
A bedroom doesn’t have to be just a big room full of stuff. I sat down and thought about how I would designate spaces in the room to house certain elements or types of play. For example, if you have a small game table in the room, make sure it is clear that that is where the game is played. By designating a play area, you will hopefully help keep toys in one area of the room rather than the entire room.
For my daughter’s room, I made sure to organize the toys, books, and clothes on the outskirts of the room, leaving the rug in the middle of the room for play. The art of Feng Shui You can also help here by making sure you don’t block the flow of the room by filling it with objects. It’s also a good idea to keep large furniture secured to the wall, following the instructions provided with the furniture, to make sure everything is secure.
4. Give things a home
One tip that I think really helped my 4 year old daughter understand how to keep her room tidy was to give things a “home.” When I involved my daughter in tidying up, I told her where things lived and that helped her understand the process a little better. With the pile of memories I had accumulated, I sorted through similar items. I then kept the piles grouped together ready to assign them a home. Below we will see more tips on how to store these groups.
With children’s toys, you have to be a little creative when considering that a group has its own home. The small playset, for example, can house all the small characters and play parts such as animals, furniture, cars. Books were simpler, but small pieces like LEGO could be assigned a new home somewhere else in the house. Depending on where you encourage your child to play, you can decide what should stay in the bedroom and what can be taken out.
5. Storage containers/baskets
Storage bins and baskets are the perfect addition to a child’s bedroom. You can choose colors and designs that match the aesthetic of the bedroom, use a label maker or stickers to assign the house to the items that will live inside it, and distribute them in places like under the bed or on shelves.
However, it is important to remember that while storage containers are a blessing in becoming the guardian of many different items, don’t depend on them as a way to keep your child’s room clean. Too many containers and you’ll have replaced toys with containers. When decluttering my daughter’s room, I decided to use neutral, clear storage boxes. I don’t want it to suddenly lose color, but I also wanted to make sure the storage boxes could fit anywhere in the house with multiple uses. However, I involved her in decorating the boxes, because the stickers can come off (thank goodness).
6. Use wall space
Depending on how much space you have, using wall space creatively can go a long way toward tidying things up. You can use a variety of shelving solutions, from floating shelves, cabinets, bookcases, easels, etc. It will vary depending on what you are looking to store and organize in your children’s bedroom. In my case, I needed more book shelves, but I also used our guide on smart ways to display books. Whichever solution you choose, it’s important to make sure that anything you use on the wall is securely secured and that you don’t display anything heavy within arm’s reach.
To utilize wall space, we also have some tips on how to clean painted walls and remove stubborn stains and pencils that may have marked them. It would be a shame to use wall space for organization while leaving messy marks visible.
7. Introduce toy rotation.
Rotating toys is a smart technique to continue breathing new life and playing with existing toys, instead of buying new ones. Organizing the toys you have and deciding which ones to donate is one way to clean up your child’s bedroom, but hiding toys in storage boxes or even other rooms and then rotating them while you remove those that have been in play for a while keeps them feel fresh.
It’s simple. Keep some toys outside, but hide others. Then, when you spin these toys, they will seem much more exciting instead of playing with them until boredom sets in. It helps limit the amount of clutter in the room while saving money.
8. Get creative with space
Storage bins, baskets, shelves, and organizing your children’s items into groups/households may be enough for you. I felt like I somehow had a little more energy left, so I explored how to be a little more creative with the new space I had made by decluttering and organizing.
I researched different ways to use the space that are fun for kids and came up with some recommendations. Cubbies are a fun way to bring the organization they learn in school into the bedroom. Hammocks for stuffed animals are a great solution to keep them all together instead of taking up space on shelves or on the bed. Collapsible containers allow for storage when not in use and also serve as a great way to store dirty or even clean clothes.
Rolling carts for books, arts and crafts, or general items that don’t have a home are a fun way to create storage that can be moved between rooms in your home. And finally, a storage bench also serves as a place to store toys and a place to sit. Depending on how creative you’re feeling or where you think you’re lacking in storage space, here are our top tips for providing even more space.
9. Renew the bedding and mattress.
So, you’ve organized your kids’ bedroom. Items have a home. Leftover things have been given away or recycled. Now it’s time to cool off a little more. Decluttering paves the way for a deeper clean in your child’s bedroom, and one piece of furniture that can always do with a good clean is the bed.
Use our guide to cleaning your mattress to see the best way to deep clean your bed. Then, change the bedding, replace the stuffed animals, and you’ll have a clean bed for a fresh bedroom. This is a task you’ll want to repeat quarterly to keep bacteria and dust away, but once finished, your child will be able to enjoy a nice clean bed.
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