Grand parents toys storage invention keeps the other toys until your child puts one back!

Now exactly how this grand parents toys storage works is a bit hard to explain… so please watch the toy cabinet in this short video.

The project

Or how I got started with the need for the One-at-a-time toy chest.

THIS PROJECT all started one day when we were visiting my son and daughter-in-law’s new house.

I watched my then 2 year old grandson literally fill the whole family room with toys in less than 10 minutes after we had arrived. Supposedly these were his toys, but I suspect most of them were really the parents toys or the grand parents toys.

Do you have too many toys in your house?

My grandson had so many toys. And he wanted to show us each one… especially the “just right” one… the fluffy brown toy at the BOTTOM of this huge wood toy chest. At this point in their lives the kids furniture and toys were creeping out of the his room and into the family room.

His parents, of course, tried to stop him from making a mess. But words were no contest against the energy of a child driven to do what kids do. Apparently he has done this before, even when there were no guests to show the toys to. I suppose that is just like most other children with traditional toy storage systems.

Later when we were all getting ready to eat, I heard his parents talking to him about picking up toys for the 11th time. The threats were starting to escalate and the kids furniture obviously wasn't going to help. So after clearing a place to sit on the floor, I sat down to help the little boy clean up. Whether they were the parents toys or his toys, he needed help.

Now my grandson actually wanted to cooperate in cleaning up toys. Unfortunately by the time the fifth toy went into the toy storage box, we came across one he hadn’t seen for a while. Of course he wanted to play with this toy for “just a minute more!” And on and on it went... Sound familiar?

So I thought, “This is too much to expect of a toddler. Why does he have all these toys out in the first place? Why does he have so many toys!” The sheer quantity seemed to diminish the value of each toy. And the kids furniture wasn't helping.

Maybe Rube Goldberg could come up with a useful way to harness the energy of the family cat and dog to help pick up toys.

"Time for dinner!"

Maybe a robot could patiently ask him to put each toy in a container after he was done with it. This robot would only only need one program: say “pick that up” whenever the child went back to the toy bench for another toy. Do you feel like a robot sometimes?

Well, we don’t have home robots quite yet so that is not a solution. I tried to think of other ways to prevent my grandson from getting into this mess in the first place. How about if he could only get one toy out of the toy cabinet at a time? Say he had to put the last one back before the next toy was available. That would be a whole new paradigm in kids furniture. Maybe the robot could even tell the kids toys from the parents toys.

"Why should I have to do it? You bought them!"

Rather than picking them all up at once, I thought, why not pick them up just one at a time? He could certainly handle that. My idea was to have him START cleaning up toys BEFORE the toys are really all spread out. Then there would be no big mess or clutter to deal with. For grand parents toys are looked at differently.

I felt that kids furniture should be helping out, not contributing to the clutter. Have you ever wished for a storage organizer or system that could do that?

Well, I am an engineer, teacher and a kind of handy-man so I set about designing and building the kids furniture you saw in the video. Fortunately at just that point in time I was organizing my garage workshop. I was teaching a university class on the "5S" manufacturing clean up process and wanted to verify my procedures.

This clean up turned out to be a very good thing. You see, I ended up building over twenty toy cabinet prototypes before I came up with one that worked to my satisfaction. The particular toy cabinet in the video is number twenty-six.

Not only have I had a fun multi-year project, but I've been able to tie in parenting education (from the perspective of a grandparent), child psychology, furniture materials, keeping the house neat and instilling good habits in young children, NOT fighting/whining/arguing about picking up toys.

So, does your household also have WAY TOO MANY TOYS?

Should toy storage furniture actually get your kids to put away their own toys? Site also discusses maintaining an orderly playroom from the child's point of view.

Leave a message or see more toy chest photos at our craft show blog.

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