Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child’s Room Clutter Free

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
With a little help from Dollar Tree, we’re cleaning up the clutter in my sons’ room! #spon

What’s the one room in your home where you just want to close the door and not look? If you’re in my home, it’s definitely my sons’ bedroom! This mystery-pit is the catch-all for toys, games, clothes, school work, musical instruments, and everything else that my children collect and accumulate throughout the week.

Maneuvering around Lego landmines and stinky sock piles certainly makes keeping my sons’ room like a never-ending battle. I’ve learned though, putting a solid organization plan in place is the best method of attack and the key to teaching them some healthy room habits.

With a few simple items picked up at our local Dollar Tree store and a systematic approach to the clutter, my daily chore load has gotten lighter and the bombs have cleared out of the building block minefield.

Dollar Tree Store
Our local Dollar Tree store

The three key areas I approached are toys, clothing and homework.  All hot spots for organization trouble in our home and all contributors to my sons’ chaos in their room.

Toys 

If there is one thing kids have more of any other item, it’s toys. Preventing your home from turning into one big toy box sometimes feels like a full-time job, but it doesn’t have to be. You can even get the kids to help keep their stuff picked up, if you make it easy and fun for them.

For the build blocks bomb zone we have, I had large containers set up for them, but noticed it was the small pieces I seemed to keep stepping on!  Getting at the root of the problem, it turns out the kids were having to dig through the bigger containers and either pushing pieces out in the process or simply leaving the small part lying around.

A few shoe-size boxes from Dollar Tree with label for the pieces provided a quick and inexpensive solution! ($6 for 4 boxes, labels and markers.) 

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Use clear storage containers to help clean-up and organize small toy pieces.

I used clear boxes with clear lids, so the boys can easily identify what is in each box and it helps them to easily sort them, too.

For larger toys, pretty baskets or colorful plastic bins make it easy for kids to keep their toys put away, and even help you teach them valuable skills and habits along the way. You can make a nighttime routine of picking up all the toys and putting them in the appropriate basket just before bed. If more than one child shares a room, or if you have a lot of toys (and who doesn’t?) you might have different colored containers for each child or for various types of toys. At Dollar Tree, I found all kinds of plastic bin shapes, sizes and colors to handle toy storage.

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Color code containers to easily identify what’s inside and where they belong

I chose square green containers to place around my sons’ room for them to easily place toys when they are finished with them.

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Use baskets to help keep bigger toys organized

These containers are the perfect size and shape for toy storage but also for books, clothing items and evening small gaming systems.  At $1 each, they will soon find their way into all parts of my home!

Movies and Video Games

Video games and movies are another toy-related hassle for us around our television sets.  Generally I find them lying around on the desk or floor.  For an easy solution, I grabbed a few rectangular bins to make them easy to put away, yet still be browsed through or selected easily.

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Rectangular baskets are perfect for storing video games and movies

To “dress” the boxes up a bit our family room area, I purchased adhesive paper craft tape from Dollar Tree to add design interest and to provide the ability to label the boxes later on.  I’m planning to categorize them by interest or game type and will write each on the label for ease of finding and storing.

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Use adhesive paper craft tape for decorating and labeling storage containers

Clothing

Overflowing dresser drawers and jam-packed closets not only contribute to clutter, but they make getting ready for school in the morning a real challenge. Keeping all that clothing organized might seem impossible, but a simple schedule can turn a day-long job into a quick task.

While your kids are younger and growing rapidly, it can help to evaluate each piece of clothing every time you fold laundry. This might mean simply asking yourself if the item still fits. If it does, it goes back in the drawer, if not, donate it. In addition, check for stains, tears, and other damage that can’t be hidden or fixed, and toss those items that are no longer wearable.

For older kids, you won’t have to do this with each load of laundry, but you should do it at the end of every season. When you put away the summer clothes as you prepare for back to school, look at each item and ask yourself if it will still be wearable in the spring. Make a donation pile for those items that won’t be useable. If you can use the items for younger children later, then sort them by size and store in clearly labeled bins, ready to pull out when they’re needed.

A clothing-related clutter problem we had every morning in my sons’ room was finding items they emptied out of their pockets the night before scattered around the room.  Not only did it cause a mess, but it also slows us down each morning when we have to scramble to find the keys, money or flash drive that went missing.

With $5 worth of products from Dollar Tree – a picture hanging kit and 4 jumbo clip cups – I’ve made this problem dissappear…

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Think “outside the box” to find new ways to use common items

… by setting up a simple wall station for catching pocket stash!

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
Create a designated area to store important every-day items

This station corrals all the important small items that always seem to wind up in their pockets, making it super easy to store at the end of the day and find in the morning.

The cups are hung right next to their bed over the night stand and a small waste basket (to catch the gum wrappers and other garbage they empty out of their pockets.)  This visually reminds them each night and day.  It’s also been a laundry lifesaver as I no longer have to worry as much that I’ll miss something they left in their pockets and accidentally wash it.

Homework and Other School Supplies

Is there anything worse than scrambling to get ready for school and not being able to find that math homework that’s due today? Well if you make it a habit to keep school supplies and homework organized, you’ll rarely have to worry about missing the bus.

Start with a designated place where all homework is stored. This might be an “in” basket on a desk, or a small box or basket on a shelf, but the point is, when your child comes home from school, everything he or she brings with him goes there. During homework time, he’ll know exactly where to look for the necessary books and papers, and when he leaves for school the next day, he’ll know just what he needs to take along.

We set up a simple basket, purchased from Dollar Tree, with notebooks, paper and other supplies on their desk top, with space next to it to put their backpacks.  Now I don’t have to hear “Mom, I need a pencil” because they know where to find and store everything homework related.

Dollar Tree Solutions: 5 Easy Ways to Keep Your Child's Room Clutter Free #DIY
A designated homework center is key for keeping student organized

Keeping kids organized can seem like an uphill climb, but by setting up some easy-to-follow, colorful, fun systems and by enlisting their help, you’ll not only have a much more organized home, but you’ll also have far less stress. Plus, you’ll be teaching your children how to live a clutter-free life, and that will serve them well over the years.

I spent under $20 to find solutions for keeping my kids’ room clutter free, which easily saved me countless hours of cleaning and has helped make our lives a lot less stressful.  Definitely a win!

If you have items on hand that can be re-purposed for any of these solutions, terrific!  If not, you’ll find all of these items and more at your local Dollar Tree.  To find a Dollar Tree location near you, visit http://www.dollartree.com  Many of the items featured can also be found for purchase on the Dollar Tree website, as well.

by
Barb Webb. Founder and Editor of Rural Mom, is an the author of "Getting Laid" and "Getting Baked". A sustainable living expert nesting in Appalachian Kentucky, when she’s not chasing chickens around the farm or engaging in mock Jedi battles, she’s making tea and writing about country living and artisan culture.
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Comments

    • Grace
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    I love the Dollar Tree and find so many great things I can afford. I love this idea and I’m going to be using it for my ‘mystery-pits’ in some of my rooms.’

    • Pam
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    I really like shopping at Dollar Tree too. They have some great, low cost supplies for crafts.

    • Pepper Tan
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    Thanks for those tips. Yes, it does take guts to step inside a kid’s room. Keeping it clutter-free helps organize even the way you think or feel..

    • Columba Lisa
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    Good ideas! Now that my kids are teens, we are considering packing up their Lego models in Ziplocks, with the assembly instructions included. They can save them for their children. Older Lego models are valuable, too.

    • Lisa Gradess Weinstein
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    I am going to share your tips with my teenager! On most days, you can’t see the floor of her room because of all of the clutter. She plops her dirty clothes on the floor NEXT to the hamper…go figure!

    • Michorose Agui
    • January 13, 2014
    Reply

    You’re a genius! We actually have the blue square bins from the Dollar Tree. The big ones and the smaller matching ones. They fit on their shelves perfectly. Thanks for all the great tips!

    • The Budget Diet
    • January 14, 2014
    Reply

    Living proof that you can organize without an expensive trip to the Container Store…looks great!

    • Dominique Goh
    • January 14, 2014
    Reply

    This containers are really useful to decluttering and organizing the area.. great tips!!

    • Christy Garrett @ Uplifting Families
    • January 14, 2014
    Reply

    I love shopping at the dollar store. They have great products that work just as well as the more expensive ones. Thank you for the reminder. 😉

    • Amy Purdy
    • January 14, 2014
    Reply

    The Dollar Tree is my favorite place to shop. If I’m not careful I will spend $50 in there lol I just get so excited about all the great stuff I can find for a dollar. I have gotten pretty good at determining what I can find cheaper elsewhere. For instance, I thought the $1 pregnancy test was a great find until I realized Walmart had the same kind for .87 (and they work just as well as the more expensive brands). I think every room in my house has some type of storage container from The Dollar Tree.

    • Courtney Gillard
    • January 19, 2014
    Reply

    I love the baskets hanging on the wall idea. I did a lot of this with my 4 step-daughters. Now they are all grown, and their storage baskets are still everywhere filling up closet space. I give away as much as I can now, and the storage containers go to my husband’s car restoration hobby, storing car parts. Those containers will go far;)

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