Hello again! And a very happy Sunday my friends!

Can you believe we’ve reached Week Seven of our {Sparking Joy} series?!

Seriously! Seven weeks of decluttering, organizing and tidying our home. Can you believe it?

I’ve teamed up with an amazing group of bloggers to share our journeys as we rid our lives of clutter!

 

 

A Journey to Sparking Joy with:

Anderson & Grant
Making it in the Mountains
DIY Passion
Dwelling in Happiness
Zevy Joy
Cupcakes & Crinoline
Lost in the Found
The Happy Housie

 

Turns out the real magic to tidying up doesn’t come from clever storage ideas or organizing tricks, it all starts with the act of decluttering. Makes sense. The less you have to keep organized, the less work it will be to keep it all in it’s place.

 

Easier said than done.

Following the principles outlined in the life-changing magic of tidying up, we’ll be working our way through the entire house to get rid of anything and everything that doesn’t spark joy. The ultimate goal of course is to simplify our life. Follow along as we share our journey to declutter … who knows, maybe it will even inspire you to start one of your own too!

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*This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please see my disclosure policy.*

 

My journey to {sparking joy} so far:

Week One: How Decluttering can Change your Life
Week Two: Decluttering the Closet
Week Three: Decluttering Make-up, Shoes & Accessories
Week Four: Decluttering Books (& a million other things!)
Week Five: Decluttering All Things Paper
Week Six: Decluttering & Organizing the Kitchen

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So far my bloggy friends and I have been working through each category as a group, but we’ve decided to change things up a bit for Weeks Six and Seven, to take on the areas we need to tackle most in our own homes. For me, there’s just no question that our kitchen and playroom were in desperate need of some tidying! Last week I took on my Kitchen, but this week is all about the Playroom!

There’s no denying it…

Despite my very best efforts, this playroom is nothing but a disorganized, cluttered mess. It’s also the most overwhelming room in our entire home. Even when the toys are all put away, it looks like a disaster. There’s just SO MUCH STUFF.

Ugh.

I mean honestly, this is the view that greets me (and everyone that visits our house) each time I walk through our front door…

So, until we can get started renovating our entire main floor (which will see this playroom moving to the back of our house – yay!), not only did I need to find a way to tame this toy clutter, but I was desperate to find a prettier way to organize what was left too!

Here’s what I came up with:

If you’ve read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, you’ll know that Kondo has a very black & white approach to tidying – if it doesn’t spark joy, it doesn’t belong in your home.

Simple really.

Thing is, Carson would tell me that each and every toy sparks joy for him. He would beg me to keep every single thing. There would be tears and puppy dog eyes involved. He would insist that he wants to play with it all. And he probably would, for about ten minutes, but we all know how the story goes, he would revert back to playing with his few favourites while the others sat there collecting dust.

So, I did what any good Mom with a toddler incapable of reason would do…

While Carson was napping one afternoon, I went through each and every single toy in that room and donated everything I could bring myself to get rid of. Everything I hadn’t seem him play with for a while. Every junky, dollar store toy that had been given to him by myself or well intentioned friends that simply wasn’t worth keeping. Every toy that made noises so annoying that I’d kept them on the top shelf, out of reach. Good riddance I said!

Then I had to find a place to put the rest back – create a prettier home for all that stuff that was deemed good enough to keep.

Enter IKEA and their popular Kallax shelf, or shelves rather. I picked up three of these Kallax shelves with 4 cubbies each, a few of these door inserts to help hide some clutter and of course several baskets to collect what was left.

We got a bit creative with the configuration of it all. Because it’s nice to have a few shelves that C can’t reach, we chose to stack two on top of each other. Placing another on the floor beside provided even more storage space for Carson’s most used toys, leaving a spot on top for some bigger toys that won’t fit into the cubbies. My first instinct was to add the doors to the bottom most cubbies; however, Brady pointed out that placing the baskets in the second row would make things harder for Carson to access, so we switched things up and lined the bottom row with baskets so that C could easily pull them out to see all of his toys.

Lucky for me, in all of the excitement of this new look, Carson didn’t even notice a single thing missing – which means there were no crocodile tears or pleas to keep anything. Just smiles and excitement about how tidy everything looked and how easy it was to find everything.

And the best part, Carson absolutely loves cleaning up his toys – now that we’ve got everything so neat and organized, it’s been so much easier keeping it that way!

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The life-changing magic of tidying up.

Have you heard of it? Read it? Believe in it?

What are you waiting for? Go grab your copy now and join in the fun as we embark on A Journey to #SparkingJoy and make the KonMari Method work for us!

 

Did you miss something? Catch my entire journey to {sparking joy} below:

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: {A Journey to Sparking Joy}