Hellobee

My biggest goal when organizing our home is making it child friendly. This means making areas the kids need to use as accessible as possible. With Little Lion’s move to his new room, I had the opportunity to design a closet with him specifically in mind. Come take a look!

Little Lion does not have a dresser in his room. They take up a lot of space, and beyond the bottom drawers they are really not all that accessible for small children. Eventually he will have proper furniture, but in the toddler years I feel like it is an unnecessary waste of valuable playing space.

Instead, I picked out matching baskets from Target, and these sit on the floor of his closet. There is one basket for pajamas, one for pants, one for shirts, and one that is currently empty but that will hold underwear once we have potty trained. Any clothing that needs to remain wrinkle free hangs on a low bar, but most of his clothes are play clothes and they really don’t require hanging. Having separate baskets will help Little Lion be able to choose his own clothing, and will also help him learn to put away his own clothing as he gets older.

Additionally, we have a woven basket for his dirty clothes. This basket intentionally does not match the others, so that it is obvious which basket is for clothes that are dirty. Little Lion puts his dirty clothes in this basket after bath time every night.

Above the one hanging bar we have shelves the rest of the way to the ceiling. Since we designed this closet specifically for Little Lion (it was just built this year), we didn’t include a second bar. That will be added when he is eventually tall enough to use it. For now, the extra shelves are much more useful.

One side of his closet is dedicated to housing his toys. In my post about his bedroom, I mentioned that I keep all of his toys in clear plastic bins. I specifically chose this classic style because they are inexpensive and easy to purchase or replace. Each box houses a single toy and all of its parts, or a collection of similar toys. Little Lion cannot reach these toys right now, which is intentional. He is not yet big enough to handle that many options at once. Currently, before independent play time, we choose 1-2 toys from these shelves. I pick him up and he points to which ones he wants, and I get them out for him. Once he is a little older we will add a step stool so that he can climb up (with assistance) and choose the boxes himself. The labels on the boxes (a trick I learned teaching toddlers/2’s in a daycare setting) make it easy for him to see what is inside. It also helps him to know where to return the toys when we are done playing. Full disclosure: new toys from Christmas are in boxes but are not labeled yet…that may happen before next Christmas if I am lucky!

The shelves on other wall of the closet hold other items that need to be stored in his room, but that don’t need to be accessible. Large grey crates hold extra diapers and wipes. We also have a shelf for toys that are too large to fit in a plastic box. These shelves also hold his books with paper pages, since these would easily tear if they were left on his shelf to be used without supervision.

The top shelves hold things that we don’t need often: books from my teaching days that are way too old for him, clothes he has outgrown, etc. These also do not need to be accessible, so there is no reason for them to be down low.

I love that Little Lion’s closet has areas that are accessible for things he will need to be able to get to, as well as areas that are inaccessible for things that need to be stored out of his reach. We are fortunate to have a place to keep the majority of his toys out of sight! I love how easy this system makes toy storage and rotation.