No-Effort Toddler Toy Shelving

My Handsome Hubby decided that his home office was too hot to work in.  It is a small room with western-facing windows, which in the desert, equates to a homemade sauna.  We recently sold the table in chairs in our game room, so, being empty, he moved his home office there.  And as with anytime he moves the contents of his computer room, he re-arranges stuff.  When the dust settled, a lonely computer desk hutch was left.  Rather than let it toil away in the garage collecting dust and not adding to our lives, I decided to use it to solve a rather growing problem in my living room.

You see that blue laundry basket toy box in the photo above?  Baby Boy's toys are housed there and it really was just an over-flowing pile in the corner of our family room that migrated through the rest of the downstairs.  It was time for a toybox intervention.  *Lightbulb*  The discarded computer desk hutch would make a great shelving unit to help organize Baby Boy's toys.  I took a moment to bask in my genius and moved the hutch to toy mountain. 

Hard work, I know.  No cutting, no measuring, no nailing, no painting; this was my kind of busy-weekend project.  The height of the hutch was just lower than chest level on Baby Boy, so I put puzzles and other manipulative (not sure that's the right word) toys on the top of the shelf so he could access them easily and not drag them to the floor.  This has been great because he plays with those toys more now that they're not buried in a toy box or scattered on the floor somewhere.  I used the shelves for his books and blocks and put his toy box in the middle so he can easily get to it, but it doesn't become the base of a toy mountain.  Now, this isn't the prettiest or most organized toy shelf, but it is a HUGE improvement from what it was and it was totally free to me.  Better yet, my garage doesn't have more clutter in it and it's not taking up space in a landfill.  So I feel pretty good about my next-to-nothing effort toddler toy shelving. 

What steps have you taken to tame the toy mountain in your kids' play area?




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