Kids need bins for all their crap

As an organized person who can’t stand visual clutter, our six-year-old daughter’s bedroom throat-punches me on a regular basis.

Every few months, I plunk myself down on her carpet and implement yet another “solution” that’s hopefully going to make it easier to keep her room clean.

Her bookcase was too small, so I swapped it for a larger cube system and added labelled bins for the books I wanted to keep separate — the rest can be shoved anywhere in the cubes. That worked well.

Her Barbie stuff was out of control, so I dragged in three massive storage totes that would allow her to dump everything inside when she was finished playing. That’s also worked well.

The trouble is that she has so many tiny toys, and nothing was working. I built adorable wooden ledges so she could line up her Shopkins in rows. That was too difficult to maintain, apparently.

I brought up clear plastic shoeboxes to store her Legos, My Little Ponies, Squishies and LOL Dolls, but she’d lose the lids and suddenly there were just empty clear bins and stuff all over the floor.

When I’d ask her to put everything away, she’d cry that it would “take forever” … and, yeah, it would at the rate she was moving.

“She just needs … crap bins!”

I exploded one day to my husband, annoyed by yet another attempt to keep her room reasonable. “She needs a bunch of bins where she can shove all her random crap, and I don’t even care what’s in there as long as it’s off her floor!”

It’s true. Adults have junk drawers and junk baskets and the freedom to put our crap wherever we want because we’re adults. Kids should have a place to quickly shove things — not everything, but some things — that don’t seem to have a place.

A vision started forming in my mind …

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