With house showings on a regular basis, I am constantly trying to think of ways to stage my house and make it look its best to a prospective home buyer. Except in rare cases, kids’ big, colorful, plastic toys rarely add value to a room. In other words, it detracts from the room’s features and makes the space look otherwise cluttered or cheap. However, selling a house doesn’t happen overnight – it takes weeks, if not months, to sell a house and I can’t take away all my kids’ toys for months! What would they do?

So I have found a few ways to organize their toys and keep them off the floor, so a home buyer can walk into the space and evaluate it for the features present. These tips are particularly useful if you are selling your home, but they are general organizational ideas to help you tame the kid toy clutter everyday!

Where to hide and store kids’ toys

• Get a large under-bed plastic storage bin and hide a ton of small toys in there. This works well for stuffed animals and other small, noisy toys. Slide it under the crib or toddler bed.
• Find a large wicker basket and fill it up with toys. Don’t place it in the middle of the room, where it will be features and overly visible, but place it in the corner of the room, preferably partially concealed by some furniture.


Wicker basket with toys

• Get pretty, decorative containers and storage cubes and place them very visibly in the center of the closet. You can fill these with anything – small toys, blankets, hats, socks, etc. They look beautiful and make the closet look well organized. I got the circular green ones from Ikea and the green storage cubes from the Dollar Tree.


Decorative closet baskets

For more tips on staging the home, see this post on general staging tips, this post on cleaning up windowsills, this post on home showing checklists and this post on home organizing hacks.

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