We're continuing our journey to set up and organize my new house and today I just had to show you how I reorganized the cabinet where we keep all of our board and card games! This may seem trivial and inconsequential but it honestly makes me giddy every time I open it- this simple reorganization has made it so much easier for us to see all the games we have without anything getting buried in a pile, and most importantly so much easier to grab the game we want without having to take out 5 other games that are stacked above or around it. So we can get to playing together faster, and never forget about all the cool games we have!
I am a huge fan of games. I grew up playing board games and card games with my family and now I love playing with my own daughters! So over the years we have accumulated a pretty good collection of them. I honestly never gave a second thought to the way we had them sorted- in a few drawers of our china cabinet, and stacked on top of each other on some shelves in the playroom. I wish I had a picture of the drawers because they were honestly terrible, because I was trying to cram in big boxes of board games with decks of cards, little games with little bits and pieces in bags- they were a mess and I honestly forgot about some of the games we had that got shoved in the backs of the drawers until we packed it up to move! Here's a picture of one of the shelves where I had some stacks of games- not the worst thing, but it meant any time I wanted the game on the bottom I had to take out the whole stack:
I'm saying all of this to try to convey just how excited I am about this seemingly small change to this:
Why did it never occur to me before to put the board games on the shelves vertically?!? Now we can see them all, and grab just the one we want without moving all the others, just like books on a bookshelf. There were some games that didn't fit on the shelf vertically because of the shape of the box, so I just moved the first shelf down to the lowest spot and put the next one just above it so there's just enough room to store those bigger boxes horizontally without having to stack multiple games on top of each other- the only exceptions are the ones at the very bottom, but with only a couple of games to slide out from under another box, I'm calling that a massive win!
Storing the board games this way actually took up a lot less space too. When I first put the games in this cabinet those games took up all of that shelf space plus one of the drawers on the other side, but now that I got those out of the drawer, the smaller game pieces and decks of cards can sit in one layer in the drawer where we can see everything and grab what we want from there as well (and I even realized there were several decks of cards and smaller games that I could store vertically in the drawer as well).
All of that reorganizing not only made it easier to find and get everything, but it freed up two entire drawers where I can now keep puzzles and recipe books (this game cabinet is next to the kitchen and living room- it makes sense, trust me). Here's a quick video tour of the whole cabinet so you can see how it all came together:
So the moral of the story is if there's a storage or organization system that you're unquestioningly using that is adding some annoyance to your use of the items being stored, there's probably a way to fix it that will bring great joy to your life without buying or building anything or even requiring much time or effort. At least if a well-organized thing brings you joy like me.
I've actually written about my toy storage systems a number of times over the years (though none of them seem as revolutionary as this one to me at the moment!)- here's what I've used over the years, especially when my daughters were toddlers and preschoolers, if you're interested in seeing what else I've done (click on each photo to visit the blog posts explaining how I set them up):
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