How To Win The War Against Toy Clutter

Money Saving Mom blog is on a mission to help us save our sanity by teaching us how to keep the toy clutter at bay.

I'm all ears, because I, for one, am tired of picking up dinosaurs in the living room and finding plastic doll food in my Tupperware cabinet.

Among other things, she suggests rotating toy collections.

If you feel like you have too many toys, but you don’t want to part with what you have, consider a rotational toy system. Put away half the toys for a month. After a month, put away the toys you currently have and get out the toys which were put away. You could even do this on a quarterly basis.

This method can help you to see what toys your children really like and use. It also might help encourage more contentment with what you already have since your children will probably feel like they are getting “new” toys quite often — when really it’s just the same old toys they’ve always had being presented in a new way!

One toy rotation system we’ve used in our home when our kids were little was the Day of the Week Tub System. This idea has so many variations, but the basic gist is to divide most of the toys in your home into seven groups and put them in seven different tubs labeled with the days of the week.

Your children can then play with the appropriate tub each day. It keeps things rotated and fresh, while creating less mess.

I think it's a great idea! I'm planning to spend the weekend sorting my son's toys into boxes. My rotation version will involve only leaving out about 20 toys at a time and rotating them every three months.

I'm also going to toss out all the “broken” toys I find in his room. Let's be real, I'm probably never going to glue that broken truck back together. It's been sitting on his dresser for months. Time to recycle it.

Check out the rest of Money Saving Mom's 5 simple ways to cut down on toy clutter and then share your ideas for winning the battle against clutter in the comments.