How to Organize Your Kids’ Toys That Come With Small Accessories

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Elizabeth MacAndrew

If your kids are above the age of three, chances are good that the end of this holiday season found them gaining some sort of toy with lots of small pieces. The thing is kids don’t usually just get one toy like this — no, the accessory containing toys are frequently additions to entire lines of these things, and your kids tend to own far more than just a few of them.

In our house, Playmobil is the line our kids collect like crazy. Other parental units I know have listed such well-known lines as Barbie, Hatchimals, Littlest Pet Shop, Polly Pocket, L.O.L Surprise!, and even craft supplies as being the offenders in their homes. Building toys like LEGO, K’nex, and even the classic Lincoln Logs were also mentioned, but building type toys deserve their own post regarding organizing. For this article, I am going to focus on toys with accessories.

I have been asked how I keep my boys’ Playmobil so nice before, and the most simple answer is: we organized it up front and have maintained it ever since. As the collection grew, we organized the new sets a soon they entered our play loft. This was all done under a few specific understandings:

1. A toy with small pieces is not as fun to play with if you can’t ever find the pieces.
2. No one spent good money on these toys for their small pieces to be scattered all of the house, clog vacuums, act as a choking risk for younger siblings and pets, and to be stepped on by parents.

Our organizing system mostly runs on a series of plastic box type organizers and IKEA KALLAX units. This post is not being sponsored by IKEA in any way, this is just what I’ve found to be helpful product wise. I also like that KALLAX units age up better with kids than traditional toy boxes. We use them for books, board games, puzzles, as console tables, even as nightstands in other areas of the house. Other companies do make cube style organizers similar to a KALLAX unit, I just don’t know which plastic storage units fit them best.

The biggest thing that has helped us is to not just throw everything in a big box and hope that works out. Kids can’t easily find that one figure or that one accessory so they go to the…