Board Game Storage and Messy Hannah

This is what the closet shelves looked like today before I
reorganized some of the games.  Sorry for the fuzzy picture!!
Don't know what happened there.

If your kids are like ours, they loooove board games!  I do too.  But I don't like storing their board games because the boxes always take up a ton of room.  In our house we don't have much storage space so board games live in our bedroom.  It's nice because they don't get destroyed or have pieces lost.  For awhile we kept them under our bed, but we accumulated too many for the kids (and we parents) to find what they were looking for.  Then I started putting a couple of the boxes in one of those under the bed storage containers, but that filled up FAST.  As we've acquired more games as the boys have gotten older, those boxes then spread into our closet, taking up valuable storage space in there.

A couple years ago when one of the game boxes was too mangled to hold its game, I threw all the parts in a ziplock bag.  I've been doing it with other games too as their boxes have broken down.  I noticed very quickly how much less space the games took up that way.  Then it hit me... why not store as many games as possible like that, even in if the boxes aren't broken?  Ah ha!

It's currently 65 degrees on this January day, and I can't help but be in a spring cleaning kind of mood.  For awhile I've wanted to take more of our board games and ditch the boxes, so I finally got to that project today!

Here is the under-bed storage container with at least 10 games in it.  With games like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders whose game boards are big, the board sits in the storage bin on its own and the cards/pawns are in sandwich size ziplock bags.  We can easily sift through for the board and bag we need.  For our Toy Story KerPlunk game (complete with sticks, a rocket, and 30 some little green alien guys!), those pieces are all a gallon sized bag. 

 While our closet still has games because some still really need the box (Mouse Trap, need I say more?!), there is more room for OUR stuff... in OUR closet, imagine that... once again!

These are the boxes I got to get rid of today.

And for the complete antithesis of all things clean and organized, I give you Hannah Mary.  She is at a stage where she likes to take books of shelves, empty toy boxes, and my personal favorite, taking clean laundry out of the laundry basket as it sits on the floor.  Doesn't she know she is the daughter of a woman who has Monica Gellar-Bing like tendencies??!!  I give you the following pictures of her destruction for your viewing pleasure.

Series A:  laundry dumping.  She unloaded a basket full of hers and her brothers' clean clothes and some sheets.  I LOOOOVE the pictures of her chewing on the boys' [clean, I'd like to remind you] underwear!  Those are teenage girl bribe-worthy.

I'm done.  On to something else now.

And series B:  The living room after 2 days of Hannah having her way with it.  I finally picked it all up this afternoon.  She threw the books, one by one, out of the little basket, pulled more books off the shelves, and left [what seemed like] a hundred toys scattered throughout the room.

The end.  Happy cleaning!