A Storage Solution for Big Toys {and an IKEA hack!}

If you have been reading this blog for long, you know that we do not live in the biggest house on the planet. Our home is a 3 bedroom townhouse, and it may not be the fanciest thing ever, but it’s ours and we love it. 🙂 Though we don’t have a dedicated toy room, we have a large living room area, so one side houses the couch, coffee table, and TV, and the other half is toy heaven. When the Cs started accumulating a lot of toys, we purchased an EXPEDIT (which has since been replaced by the KALLAX) from IKEA, labeled some bins, and called it a day.

But then something started to happen. As the Cs got bigger, so did their toys. Things that didn’t fit in the EXPEDIT were put in the “toy corner,” and eventually, we ended up with this:

It was a big hot mess of toy clutter that was driving this mama crazy. And this was a good day– sometimes it was all just thrown in a pile! Eeek! So when Christmas happened and was closely followed by Connor’s birthday which meant that even more big toys made their way into our house, it was time to do something about the toy situation. {I got rid of a bunch of toys, I promise! They just really like the big ones! 😉 }

I went on a search for some sort of storage something that would tame this craziness, and I stumbled upon the perfect thing at my oh-so-trusty IKEA. I should have known they would have a solution! We ended up bringing home two GORM shelving units, which were technically from the pantry section but were a great size for the toys we had as well. (And at $30 each, you can’t beat the price!)

Donnie put them together for me and we were in business! Except… the raw wood wasn’t really doing it for me. Around here anything that can be painted usually does get painted at some point, and these little babies were no exception.

Because they are in our main living area that we use all the time, I didn’t want any crazy colors or kid-themed designs even though they were going to hold toys. I also knew that with as much as I change things around, I would want to be able to use them for something else if I needed to. I ultimately decided to whitewash them and {spoiler alert!} I really love how they came out!

I had done a little whitewashing before, but I wanted to make sure I was doing it the right way, so I checked out several different tutorials before I got started and each one recommended something different! One said use two parts water to one part paint. Another said use two parts paint to one part water. A third one said that I should stain before I whitewashed. And yet another one recommended glaze. I think I ended my research more confused than when I started! Fortunately, I found this process pretty forgiving and after trying several different methods, I found that what worked for me was to do a mixture of about 60% paint and 40% water. I painted it on my surface and then used a rag to wipe off some of the excess.

The result was the exact look I was going for: softer and lighter than the plain wood but still allowing some of the wood grain to show through. I snapped this photo when one of the units was painted and the other wasn’t– you can see the difference:

{Just ignore the fact that there are toys everywhere and some of my Christmas decorations are still up in the background, mmmk? 😉 }

I finished painting GORM #2 and I had two beautifully whitewashed toy shelves! Yippee!!

These truly ended up being the perfect pieces to hold all of those big, bulky toys. Everything is super easy to find and there is no more toy explosion in the corner of my house, so that’s a plus.

Oh and that’s not all. Since my shelves are white, that means they qualify as a neutral, which makes them the perfect submission for this month’s Get Your DIY On theme: Neutral Decor Projects We Love! My lovely co-hostesses have been hard at work on their neutral projects as well:

Neutral Gallery Wall by Mandy, The Hankful House

Gold and White Herringbone Decorative Flower Pot by Krista, The Happy Housie

DIY Antiques Sign by April, House by Hoff

Rosette-Framed Mirror by Christy, Confessions of a Serial DIYer

And if YOU have any neutral posts in your archives, we would love for you to come link them up this Sunday, February 1st at 7 pm EST! We can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with! See you at the party!

What is your system for storing big toys?