This is a little trick for basement toy storage. You know those articles that are magazine ready with complete repainting and unrealistic styling? Yeah, this isn’t one of those. This is one of those nagging little projects that I’ve been wanting to do for about 5 years, but who’s counting?

And it only took about 30 minutes, even with taking the pictures.

Basement Toy Organizing Problem:

Games and some toys I keep out of reach are stored in the shelves in the stairwell leading to our basement, behind a door that the kiddos can’t open. It isn’t fancy, but since the kids have to “trade” a game before I’ll get another one out, it helps keeps our place relatively tidy. But the game boxes were all stacked one on top of another, and it made it hard to get to ones on the bottom, which meant some toys never got played with.

Basement Toys Before:

Basement Organizing Solution:

These little Ekby shelf brackets from IKEA (a 2-pack is $5) are the solution. You usually see them mounted below the shelves, but I mounted these above the shelves to provide a stop so games won’t slide off the end or topple over in the middle.

Organized Basement Toy Shelves After:

Because they are “filed” and not stacked, each box is just as easy to get to as the next one. (Grandparents, take note, I only have more room on the bottom shelf, max height= 9″.)

More Toy Organizing Tips

I love cup hooks. Adding a few more here under the shelves mean that we can hang things like kitchen aprons, the favorite picnic blanket, and the bubbles sitting nicely in a sand pail and hung on a hook by the handle, freeing up shelf space.

Use a tin to organize smaller things, like card games, so they can also be stored on the shelves.

Stored vertically, the board games and especially puzzles can get messy if they were to fall off. So store small pieces inside the box in a zipper bag inside the box.

Keep batteries nearby. This great Battery organizer with Tester hangs on the wall opposite the games, with a built-in tester to help eliminate dead batteries in my fresh stash.

By the way, in case you are wondering, I did purge one whole grocery bag of items off the shelves during this project and, yes, this is mostly all the games and puzzles for 2 kids. I rotate them out ruthlessly as the girls outgrow them.

What do you think? Are there good toy organizing ideas here? Did you get an idea for using small spaces (like the space in the basement stairwell) to help you organize? If you like these ideas, please pin the following picture by hovering over it to click. Thanks!