Baby Organizing Ideas

If you’re fighting the good fight of maintaining any sense of style in your home with all the stuff that comes along with babies, then let’s commiserate. Before you have a little one, you feel as though you have all the baby organizing ideas, but it so quickly gets out of your control!

Baby Organizing Ideas

Before your little one arrives, you think you’ll have total control over how baby stuff will fit into your home. And no, your house will not be overtaken with baby gear. And in reality, all their stuff will be in their room or by their crib. You’ll make sure of it…

And then before you know it, your living room is covered in a stroller, car seat, backpack/baby bag, sit-to-stand, and rocker. And don’t forget the toys, the books, the drying bibs, and possibly the cloth diapers air drying by the window. It’s really quite glamorous…

Ok. Maybe it isn’t, but it’s real life for every single parent. It’s a reality we all face and to a point, your home will be taken over with baby stuff, but there is a method to the madness of maintaining some control over your home ‘decor.’

The problem comes with seeing their stuff as an addendum to your home really. The influx of baby stuff, however, is too much to just think of as extra. It really has to be a part of your home, so embrace it and handle it as best you can!

There are two parts to incorporating babies into your home without completely losing your sense of home, style, and sanity.

Living with Less

The number of things for babies out there is infinity. I know that isn’t mathematically or grammatically correct, but you get it! There’s the cutest, perfect toy for everything. In fact, there are many perfect toys for everything. You have to be diligent (same for kids clothing).

The first step to this is not overbuying before your little one comes along. Short of the carseat, stroller, and one glider (this one has seriously been one of the best things we picked out), we didn’t setup or even buy anything sizeable for our little guy before he was born.

It helped that we knew we were moving in a few months, so overdoing it was out of the question.

In reality, however, for the first few months, you really don’t need much more; they aren’t playing much with toys. From there, you can add in items you feel are appropriate.

The hard part comes with gifted items. The impulse buying with baby stuff is a serious epidemic; I’m convinced. We absolutely love that friends and family want to buy C gifts, but we try to make it clear that we’re trying to live with less (less items and less neon plastic).

We have also returned a few gifts that we just couldn’t find a need for. Don’t tell anyone.

And, of course, we have certainly added in items (this gym pictured above has been the gift we detested the most but have seen the most mental growth from) that we didn’t plan on.

And I’m trying to maintain a one-in-one-out policy so that for every new BIG toy that comes in, we try to move one out whether into storage and by giving it away. {UPDATE: This becomes harder as they get older, but we’re still trying to keep it in mind}

How to Store Kids’ Toys in Public Spaces

So besides the big stuff there is also a lot of small stuff. And while keeping it all in their room sounds ideal, it’s truthfully not functional unless you plan to spend every minute of your day in their room (or running into their room).

If you’re like us (or any other parent I’ve talked to), the living room and the couch are where you’ll spend your time – hence why toys big and small all end up in there!

Everything has a Place

Instead of just throwing toys and necessities on the table, we added a small basket on top of the coffee table. It holds his little toys, a nail file, a pacifier, and some aquaphor. I think I also have chapstick and a pen in there – easily accessible!

As his toys and collection grew, we actually opted for a bigger (very stylish I might add) basket that holds many of his toys. It kind of keeps us in check in terms of how many toys we have. At first, it was great because we could easily pull it to the middle of the room and he could sort through it.

Now we keep it in that corner, but it’s perfect! It’s also wonderfully chic, so it will forever be in our home (long past the kids’ toys stage).

And when possible, we’ve picked baby toys that aren’t in stark contrast with our style. Obviously wood toys are much easier to match And this high chair with walnut legs was the perfect addition to our dining table!

As he gets older and the coffee table will be just at his level, we will likely have to move that out of the way. But then when he’s even older and not just recklessly knocking stuff around, we want his toys to be in a place he can easily get them and (eventually) put them away. 

Finding place for toys

Since his toys are going to get bigger with time, I’m picking out places to keep them that are in the common area. We don’t want him to feel his stuff is separate from ours nor do we want our home overloaded with his stuff.

I have the bottom shelves of the builtin in our living room in mind for this!

And finally, you will be gifted/find some toys that are cute and stylish. For these, we’ve actually added them into our decor.

So you’ll see the caterpillar in our dining room, a stuffed giraffe on his clothing bins in our room, and this adorable macrame owl my friend gave him for Christmas.

How to Organize Baby Gear

This sounds stupidly simple, but everything needs to have a place. This walker thing lives here when he isn’t using it. The bunny chair is in front of the fireplace. The stroller is actually in the trunk of my car most times – not taking up space in our home.

For When Your Baby Starts Crawling

It’s all fun and games until your little one is on the move. Within a week or so, your life elevates about 3-4 feet. What everyone has to move varies, of course. Our things are the guitars that were previously on stands (see above), the coffee table, and the snake plant (that one in the corner behind the toy “car”).

For the guitars, we hung them on the wall with these hardwood guitar hooks. We ended up using our own studs and screws as the ones provided didn’t work in our wall. It was easy enough to swap those out.

Next up came the coffee table. We may not be done with “baby-proofing” this one yet, but here is where we started. We used this furniture guard. It’s translucent and hardly noticeable.

We pulled too tight the first time and had to reapply it the following weekend. And then I added in extra double sided tape and the provided tape is thinner than I’d like. So far, we are happy with it, however!

The photo below shows you a close up of the corner guards.

A note on the snake plant. Snake plants are actually poisonous, so you want to keep them out of the way of little ones and furry ones – all the random things you learn once you become pregnant and have a kid!!

You’ll also want to check out things like this sustainable bedding brands roundup. Sometimes getting the basic in not so obviously blatant kid patterns can help a lot to not feeling like you’re living in a toy store!

A Reality Check

And just in case there’s a little part of you that’s thinking, “wow, Luci’s home looks quite organized and clean with all this baby stuff,” take a deep breath and laugh yourself silly…

We’re trying our best, but the shelf that shall not be mentioned is still quite a mess (and cropped out of these photos). Those baskets on the built-in to hold his stuff have still not been found.

And for the sake of pretty photos, the drool-soaked bibs were removed from the back of the couch. I also may or may not have hidden a number of things from chair to chair around our dining table so you wouldn’t see them!