Can I please have more clutter in my life?” Said no parent ever.
It’s unbelievable how clutter accumulates in a home with children. Things can get out of hand in the blink of an eye as that box of Legos spills onto the floor.
Visual clutter is incredibly stress-inducing. Can anyone fully relax in a space screaming with things to do?
Since 2013, visual clutter has been our norm since my partner David and I took on our first live-in large-scale home renovation project. As artists and dreamers, we both ambitiously took it on with the naiveté of youth and desire to create a space, specifically ours, that would eventually grow into a family and a business.
It was the beginning of our marriage; a cross-country move from the West Coast to the Midwest had recently ensued. We were balancing full-time work, student debt, and the birth of our first child, and the cherry on top was our whole house renovation we eagerly and innocently took on that devoured our free time. Designing and building was not only our hobby but a second full-time job.
Living in a renovation can’t be that bad, right? When I look back, I forget our follies and the devastating things that happened are foggy because, in the end, everything worked out.
We sold our home for a substantial profit that paid off our large student loan debt and allowed for a nice chunk of change to begin our second, much more extensive renovation project.
I barely remember the financial strain, ant infestation, roof leaks, painting, popcorn scraping, deadlines, whole house chaos, and the overwhelming feeling that brings you to your knees. I created a new mantra for myself that I use to this day:
“Everything is fixable… everything is fixable.” It only takes time and money.
With the purchase of our second home, a 1974 rambler with zero 70s charm, we not only signed up for a much larger project, but we also sprinkled a couple more children into the mix.
This was going to be our “forever home.” It’s in a good school district, close to family support, and had the potential to create our dream layout, a large kitchen open onto a sitting and dining room. It would only require moving a staircase and removing a 30-foot load-bearing wall.
Our renovation journey called for gutting our main floor and basement to the studs, eliminating any cabinet or enclosed storage to conceal our adult things and those belonging to our young children. Nothing had a place or a home. We were exhausted, constantly picking up the pieces with nowhere to put them.
We are currently at the point in our renovation process where the heavy demo is complete, and we can now focus on small yet impactful projects geared towards storage solutions.
Our first small and impactful project is our children’s toy closet. We prioritized finishing off a section of our basement for our children’s sake, adding a plywood climbing wall, a secret under-the-stairs nook, and finally having a proper toy closet to store our kids’ treasures. You know the stuff, the brightly colored cannon fodder that never gets picked up?
That brings us to step one of our modest yet mighty toy closet design + build project.
- Gather all the toys, lay them out before you, and start sorting and editing them.
Me and my ever-present anxiety and perfectionism found this task daunting. I needed professional help and turned to podcasts about cleaning to listen to the wise words of people who are winning at this elusive art.
I found the podcast, A Slob Comes Clean, to be very relatable, and the cleaning and organizing tools host and author Dana K. White teaches to be quite impactful. “Just do the simplest and most impactful thing, like take out the trash,” to gain momentum when your list is too long with cleaning to do. It is a mind shift change that simplifies cleaning to the point where the task becomes doable. The goal is more action and less thinking about your list.
A Slob Comes Clean Podcast. Host Dana K White. Episode 353: Trending Towards Minimalism with Toys with Dawn from the Minimal Mom.
The “clutter threshold” is unique to everyone, and it’s how much you fill into a space. After the chaos we have been living in since 2013, it’s evident that David and I have been uncomfortably living under a high clutter threshold that bubbles and boils into exhaustion and overwhelm, which we’d like to change.
In the podcast interview, I was intrigued by a guest, Dawn, from The Minimal Mom Blog and YouTube channel. She spoke about her experience of taking on a minimal lifestyle and significantly reducing her children’s toy collection. She pulled the wool over her children’s eyes by having her partner take the kids out for the morning as she stayed home and drastically cut down her children’s toys. She temporarily hid them in her garage to ensure her children did not want them, just in case.
You know what? They didn’t miss them. Instead, they began using their creativity and everyday items to amuse themselves and play.
Trimming the toy fat, in her case, leads to happier parents living in a minimally cluttered home and more imaginative children. Interesting thought, right?
When we began organizing, sorting, and sifting through our children’s toys, we substantially toned down our toy collection. Not to the point where I would classify it as minimal, but it’s a substantial improvement that feels good and manageable.
Next, we sorted all the toys into “play” categories, for instance, trains, magnets, and action figures. Then, we selected an appropriate size bin depending on the quantity.
An absolute must for me, design-wise, was sourcing opaque white containers for all the toys to reduce visual clutter. I prefer to label what’s inside versus actually seeing it. My favorite bins were from IKEA, and they come in various sizes.
The design brief for the closet can be simplified with one sentence- create the most storage possible inside the space. I creating a computer model (CAD) mock-up of the room, which allowed us to truly explore what would fit within every inch of the closet. David took our computer drawings and built custom floating plywood shelves to create a floor-to-ceiling storage option. We also purchased a few premade IKEA time-saving storage units that matched the plywood, giving the room a cohesive color tone and wood texture.
When installing the IKEA units, we used a little trick to fool the eye. Floating them five inches off the ground, right above our floorboards, lightens the shelves’ visual weight, making the small space feel lighter and larger.
Another essential part of the design brief was to include three separate zones within the closet:
- A library
- An imagination or dress-up station and
- The previously mentioned white container storage wall
This meant a lot of time, care, and planning went into our floor plan. Let’s take a walk-through.
A sourcing highlight for me was finding enough solid wood doors salvaged from a 1950s home in Minneapolis to outfit our entire basement, including our toy closet entry. The millwork is exquisitely minimal. Due to the age and wear, we painted everything white and updated the broken hardware.
The new Emtek doorknob and lock are in a satin brass finish. Yes, you heard that right: we can lock the closet from the outside to ensure our children are cleaning up after themselves. If the toy situation in our basement gets out of control, the door gets locked, so no more toys can be taken out until everything gets cleaned up and back into the correct bin. We aren’t trying to be outright mean parents, but desperate times call for desperate measures, right?
Our beautiful vintage door opens out and to the left, keeping the egress clear into the closet. Your eye automatically latches on to the polished brass library rail and then reads the room from left to right. For me, styling and designing is not only about showcasing pretty things in a room but controlling the viewer’s eye, telling it where to look and pause in the space.
The floor-to-ceiling library showcases our children’s books and keepsakes from David’s childhood and mine. There’s a handmade wooden whale David carved as a kid, my cherished Calvin and Hobbes comic book collection, and a housewarming gift from our first apartment together back in Seattle- a vintage scooter riding, cigar smoking bulldog piggy bank, keeping everyone in line.
These treasured items and books are stored on four vertical floating shelves, each framed within a beautiful modern brass gallery rail from Paxton Hardware. This “bit of jewelry” not only adds that necessary architectural detail that is sometimes lost in a new build or renovation but also, for practicality, keeps all the items securely in place.
Brass is a repeated element in our home and continues throughout the toy closet. Viewing straight ahead, beneath our 1970s boxy flush mount, we installed a brass clothing rack to delineate the dress-up station paired with a whimsical scalloped mirror. Every actor needs to be in character, right?
The actual function of the clothing rack is meant to be used as a pot rack. It was sourced from Etsy and holds all our dress-up clothes beautifully. The tapered “S” hooks display old Halloween costumes, some dress-up clothes handmade by my grandma, and even my “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” dance costume from the 90s.
Nostalgia and whimsy are a repeated vibe throughout the design and styling. It makes the room feel meaningful and deeply connected to us, but this feeling can also be translated to the casual observer.
As your eye passes by the vintage costumes, past the handmade giraffe made by my great uncle long past, past the two wooden toy houses my sister and I played with as children, past the beautiful and blocky handmade wooden submarine and tank made by David’s cousin, it brings us back to where we first started.
Back to the wall of organized toys hidden behind white boxes, clearly labeled with the help of an old-school label maker like the good perfectionist I am.
The piles of toys and chaos that once was will surely be a memory I will forget, intentionally leaving it in the fog.
