Toy Organization for Small Spaces: Small-Space Hacks for Any Home

Tiny Boston apartment? Sprawling suburban playroom?  Either way, toy clutter can take over fast.  In this episode I tackle the real reason toys multiply (think “permission creep” and Parkinson’s Law) and I'll share five small-space principles inspired by families who thrive in 700-square-foot city flats—but that work just as well in a four-bedroom house.

You’ll learn

🔹 One-Shelf Rule – how giving each child a single shelf (or bin/closet) puts a hard boundary on toy volume

🔹 Rotate, Don’t Accumulate – the monthly swap-out system that keeps play fresh and curbs overflow

🔹 Multi-Purpose Zones – set up rolling carts & fold-away surfaces so living rooms can flip from Lego land to adult-ready in minutes

🔹 1-In 1-Out Habit – a micro-rule for birthdays and holidays that locks in balance automatically

🔹 Contain & Label Like a Pro – nesting, picture labels, and under-bed bins that make cleanup intuitive for kids (and guests)

A gentle challenge for you:

Decide today which single shelf, drawer, or cubby will be each child’s toy “home base.”  Just pick the space—nothing more.  Tomorrow, start filling it intentionally and experience how fast visual calm returns.

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

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Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Someone really close to me is moving to Boston soon, and before they went up to do the physical apartment-hunting, we sat down over breakfast one weekend, and started looking at Zillow for what was available.
Boston apartments, I learned, are a lot like New York ones: they’re often old, they sometimes don’t have laundry in the building, meaning you’ve got to lug your laundry to a laundromat even if it’s -10 degrees outside, and they’re tiny!
I could barely believe some of the places we were seeing online. Some of these apartments are nothing more than a hallway, which is also the kitchen along one length of the hallway, a tiny bedroom with barely enough room to fit a double bed - forget a nightstand or a dresser! - and a postcard-sized bathroom. Not even a little living room sitting area! And yes, you’re supposed to pay a significant amount of rent for that!
We had a good laugh over some of the things we were seeing, and then they went up to Boston for 3 days do the hunting.
After looking at a whole lot of apartments, some of which were rented out hours after they came on the market, they found one that met their needs. With laundry in the building, thank goodness!
But now comes the challenge of how to fit their things into this tiny apartment.
Well, this is the fun part for me, and I’m happy to help with the space planning?
And today, I want to give you some tips for how to organize toys in small spaces, like a tiny Boston apartment, but these tips will also serve you even if you live in a really big suburban or country house.
I’m going to share five small-space principles that you can use starting today!

Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!

I read an article a few weeks ago about a couple who lives in a 750 square foot apartment in New York with their 3 small children.
It was more like a home tour. It’s a 2-bedroom apartment, and the kids sleep in a custom-built 3-bunk situation, and their living room has to double as the play space, as well as the entertaining area for the parents.
And it really solidifies that we can live well in a teeny tiny space. The kids are ok with fewer toys! We can be more discerning about which toys we allow into our homes, and we want those toys to capture the interest and the imagination of the kids, but also they need to fit into the space we have!
So I want to share with you 5 small-space principles that you can rely on to take control over the toys in your house, whether you live in a teeny tiny apartment, or in a much bigger house.
First, here’s a  quick reminder of the 5 Pillars of Organizing for Beautiful Living:
The first is Live Light - meaning living sustainably with less stuff,
Pillar 2 is Love Your Home - meaning creating inviting spaces for guests, and for you.
Pillar 3 is Connect Often, which is to nurture social connections daily.
Pillar 4 is Work to Live Well, meaning using systems to make work happen with fewer obstacles so you can live better.
And Pillar 5 is Thrive Daily, which is to nurture physical and mental wellness in your daily environment.
And so in this episode, which is about toy organizing touches on 3 of these pillars, specifically:
Live Light – because I’ll encourage you to have less toy inventory.
Love Your Home – I’ll tell you how to have curated, inviting kid zones.
And Thrive Daily – because through organizing the toys, there will be calmer brains for the parents and the kids.
OK so if you find that no matter what size of house you live in, the toys just explode, well you’re not wrong.
It’s like, you live in a small condo, and the toys are everywhere. So you think, logically, when we move to that big suburban house, the toys will fit better in there. But then, next thing you know, it’s not manageable again, and that’s really frustrating, isn’t it? The toys have grown, and now are all over your house.
Well, there are a couple of reasons why this happens.
The first is Permission Creep – This is when you have plenty of floor space, toys tend to migrate.
“Oh, well let’s set up the hot wheels track in the living room so I can watch the kids while I’m making dinner.”
And then the Hot Wheels just happen to stay in that living room for many, many days on end because goodness, after setting all that up, they don’t want you to take it down quite yet.
And then comes the second reason why these toys go out of control.
It’s because of Decision Deferral – You think “I’ll sort the legos and put them away later” but that becomes never.
And there’s one more reason, actually, and in time management, it’s called Parkinson’s Law, which is that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
So, if you have a deadline of 11am today, you’re going to hustle to get that work done by 11am. But if the deadline is 5pm, you’ll work from now until 5pm to get that same work done. Maybe you’ll do a little more research. Maybe you’ll edit more, or spend more time on details. But the work expands to fill the time available to complete it.
Well, we find that the amount of stuff we own tends to grow to fill the amount of space that we have available.
I mean, the couple in that article said that the fact that they have tight quarters is the reason they curate their toys so much. But if they had a basement, they woul d own twice the amount of toys than they have right now. 
So the square footage of our homes isn’t the villain. Nope. Our boundaries (or lack thereof) those are the villains.
OK, well, knowing that, we’re going to steal the boundaries that make small apartments work for New Yorkers and Bostonians, ok? These are 5 small-space principles that you can adopt, no matter what size your house is, that are going to keep your toys in order.
The first principle I’m going to suggest is One Toy Shelf Per Child. And before you reach through your phone to throttle me because no way is one shelf enough for our child’s toys, let me say that you can swap the word shelf for whatever makes sense in your house, ok? Maybe one cabinet, one drawer, one closet.
In a tiny apartment, each child gets maybe one cubby of an IKEA Kallax unit, let’s say. If the toys start to overflow from that one cubby, well then it’s time to edit those toys and get back to a quantity that fits.
How can you copy that in your bigger house?
Well you can designate one bookcase or a closet shelf per child. Add a label or a photo so the kids know whose shelf is whose, and anything that won’t fit, well you’ve got to have a “keep, swap, or donate” chat with that child.
The second principle is to Rotate, Don’t Accumulate. 
In a tiny apartment, this could look like 3 underbed bins under the parents’ bed that the toys are rotated in and out of on a monthly basis And so during a rotation, it’s easy for the parent to see if anything’s broken or outgrown.
How do you apply that to your house? Well, you don’t have to use your under-bed space for the kids’ toys. You can use a garage rack, let’s say, with a labeled tote for each kid. And set a phone reminder for a rotation on the first Sunday of each month. But same thing, as you rotate, you’re checking for broken or outgrown toys that you can recycle or donate and you’re getting them out of your house. This way, the toys aren’t just collecting into one big toy room or toy space where it’s overwhelming to go through a roomful of toys to sort out what’s broken or what’s not useful anymore. So we tend not to do it, we put it off, until our entire house is pretty much covered in toys.
The third principle is to have Multi-Purpose Zones.
In a tiny apartment, it’s not unusual to find things like fold-down wall tables that double as a maybe play-doh surface and a homework space. And the supplies for each of these activities is kept to a very limited space, simply because there is no space to spread into.
Now in a bigger house, you’ve got a kitchen or dining table that serves as homework space, snack space, or art space, and you can use a rolling 3-tier cart to easily and neatly move the supplies around. So you can keep the school supplies on the top tier, the play doh on the second tier and maybe a couple of jigsaw puzzles and board games on the last one, and you can wheel that into the dining room or the kitchen when it’s time to play, and then roll it back into the playroom, or into a closet when it’s time for meals.
The fourth principle is the One-In, One-Out micro-habit.
So in a tiny apartment, when a new birthday toy comes in, that would trigger the need to donate a toy or set of toys of equal size. And that’s the trick here, that what you donate must be of equal size - ish as what’s coming into your toy collection.
You can use the same micro-habit in your larger home to maintain order in all those toys. Just keep a donations box or bag by the back door, and then the occasional drop-offs to a donations center can become an outing for your family.
And the fifth principle is to Contain and Label well.
In a tiny apartment, it’s important to contain little things into larger ones, like nesting, so that you maintain as much floor space as possible. So you might store a pencil pouch of crayons inside a storage ottoman in the living room along with paper and some other craft supplies.
You can do the same in a larger home, but with more spaces available to store things, well labeling becomes extremely important so that you, and everyone else in your house, can remember where everything is put away.
So if you have toy cabinets, then make sure you’ve placed labels of some kind on the containers inside those cabinets so everyone knows where the crayons are, and where to put them away, which is often the hardest part, right? And be sure to use picture labels for the kids who can’t read yet.
And if you feel that you really need to label the outside of the cabinets, because sometimes you really need that, but you don’t want your living room to look like a classroom with labels stuck on each door, a tasteful solution might be to hang a little cardstock tag with a piece of  ribbon from each handle, or use a wooden doorknob hanger. You can find those at craft stores. Tags and doorhanders are easy to take off the cabinet doors so you can switch them out much more easily than a stuck-on label, and of course they look nicer, too.

So now using these 5 small-space principles for keeping toys under control is really going to change the way you deal with toys.

Do you notice that each of the principles requires you to interact with the toys in some way other than playing with them with your children?

Like, you’re going to be handling some toys one-by-one as you try to figure out why they’re overflowing the one- shelf, or when you’re doing the monthly toy rotation.

And that’s on purpose, right? The more contact you have with something, the more top-of-mind it is. And with toys, if we’re not paying attention, if we’re not regularly keeping contact, they’ll accumulate in an out-of-control way. Every birthday, every holiday, more toys are going to come into your house. And if you’re not taking those few minutes to figure out the one-in, one-out, or what can fit on the one-shelf, it’s all just going to get shoved into whatever space there is in your house without thought, and that’s how things snowball into the overwhelming mountain of toys we end up collecting.

And I know you have the best intentions for your kids. You want them to have toys they love that stimulate their imaginations, that help them to develop motor skills and social skills, and that’s why we buy toys in the first place.

So you know your intentions are good when you get a new toy. 

Remember that there’s been research to show that when fewer toys are visible, and there’s less visual noise, kids tend to have longer, deeper play sessions.

And that’s better for your kids all around. They have the chance to fully enjoy their toys, to fully engage with them, they can engage better with other kids or with you if you’re playing with them, their imaginations have the chance to flow when they’re focused on one type of play, instead of their attention being distracted quickly when there’s a room full of toys of all kinds around them.

So that’s why these 5 small-space toy organization principles - 
One Toy Shelf Per Child, Rotate, Don’t Accumulate, Multi-Purpose Zones, the One-In, One-Out micro-habit, and Contain and Label Well - these are not only good for your home, they’re good for your kids’ development.

If you would like a gentle action that you can take today to organize your toys using small-space principles: 
Decide what the one space per child will be in your house. Just make that decision. Sit with it for the day, let it grow on you. Imagine how much more organized your home will be when you’ve got that in place. Imagine how lovely it will be so see your child play deeply and with incredible imagination with a smaller set of toys. That’s all you do today. 
Then tomorrow, or Friday or Sunday, you take action on that. Once you’ve imagined it and sat with it for the day, it will become that much easier for you to take action on making what you imagined happen. What you envisioned can become a reality a bit more easily.
And if you realize you want support, moral or physical, to make that vision happen in your house, you know where to find me.
Please let me know what you thought of this episode. You can leave a rating or comment wherever you’re listening, or you can email me or send me a DM on Instagram @ fireflybridgeorganizing

Don’t forget to join the waitlist for my free class, 3 simple steps to declutter your kitchen in just a weekend. It’s getting closer and closer! I’ll let you know the date it’s going to happen soon. Go to fireflybridge.com/update to get on that waitlist, OK? That link is also going to be in the show notes for you.

Have a wonderful week! I’m Zee, and I’ll see you on the next episode.