Visual chaos: Organizing Board Games

I'm not playin'

 

Don't even think that this is a nice little piece that is about to preach the merits of a well-organized games closet and a 'how-to' bit that will only further demonstrate my OCD tendencies. This is about preserving what little sanity I have left when it comes to dealing with the chaos underfoot in this household. It's also about survival. Because I'm going to strangle the next little urchin who comes along, drags out a game, and scatters the pieces to the wind.

 

If it's been awhile since you've had little people running around, let me refresh your memory. They get into things. Lots of things. They open drawers and clear out the contents. They open boxes and dump out the contents. If the boxes are hard to open, they just tear them open, because they are on a mission. TO DUMP OUT THE CONTENTS.

 

Colin is a master at dumping out the contents. For the past 18 months, he has, on a daily basis, dumped out the contents of at least 10 - 15 different board games - in addition to everything else he does... These are games that have lots of little pieces, like RushHour, Tipover, Blokus, Dominoes, Scramble and BoobyTrap. It didn't matter if I shoved them to the back of the shelf or moved them out of reach - he would grab a chair to find them. Some days I just didn't feel like fighting the fight. Those were the days that the various game elements would migrate to every. damn. room. in. the. house. Imagine fighting this fight every day. Every day. You begin to feel that there is no hope. The mess, the broken and missing pieces... Now add this on top of the normal (and excessive) toy, laundry, and paperwork clutter. It is just too much.

 

My first attempt at containing the mess was to clear out the lower half of the upstairs linen closet and store the games there, where they would be out of sight. It is one of those closets that goes a ways beyond the width of the door, so there was room to tuck plenty of games in. This closet is located in the main hallway, and you have to walk past it all the time to get to the W&D and the kids' rooms. So Mr. Dump Out the Contents would consistently open the closet doors, drag game after game off of a shelf, and dump out the contents right there. Right where you have a 3 ft wide hallway to walk through and right in front of our bedroom door. Most of the time I would employ the 'sweep it all aside with the foot' technique, until I could take the time to put it all away. Sometimes I would forget it was there, and at 2 a.m., when a young child was calling out for me, I would have the pleasure of stepping on something like this:

 

 

 

Now that's a sure fire way to wake your ass up in the middle of the night...

 

So in November, when we moved the dining table out of the kitchen and actually had a designated dining room again, I moved the games onto a book shelf in there, thinking that we could start up Family Game Night again. Nice idea, but a very, very stupid move. Because now ALL of the games were accessible! Oh the joy! The timers! The card decks! The letter tiles! Woohoo!

 

I reached my limit last week when I took down the Christmas tree and found a treasure trove of game pieces under the tree skirt and tucked in the lower branches of the tree. I Googled up a boat load of storage pictures, ideas and suggestions. I wanted to keep the games in close proximity to the table, but if that little boy dumped out the contents ONE MORE TIME!... So they had to be out of sight in some way, but the budget was not going to allow for the purchase of anything - every potential storage container would have to be something we already owned. The most reasonable way to deal with it was to reduce the amount of 'stuff' that needed to be stored in the first place.

 

 

 

 

It took a couple of hours of all-out searching to get as many game pieces as I could find back in their boxes. I had to bribe Jordan to keep Colin occupied in the basement so he wouldn't undo everything. And then I spent the most cathartic hour..ditching the boxes, game by game. Yes. I threw away the boxes. (My brother is dying a thousand deaths right now...). I read it in multiple places, all over the advice columns of the internets (sic), that getting rid of the packaging was the best thing you could do to reduce clutter. Some of the best ideas came from homeschooling families that RV full-time - now they are the storage solution masters. There is NO reason to keep the packaging - the game boxes come in every shape and size (mostly B.I.G.), they can be a nightmare to try and keep stacked neatly, and they don't last. So, with a Sharpie, empty containers and a box of Ziplocs by my side, I went to town...

The outgoing pile of paper goods to be recycled, and non-recyclable plastic (boooo!).

 

So where'd all the games go? Well, I moved the old bookcase out, because I wanted it upstairs in our bedroom. I moved in the shoe cubby thingy from the front hallway (just a couple of feet away) and stood it up vertically. Only the kids keep their shoes here, with each kid having their own bin. (So those are the four bottom bins). The top four shelves were now going to be repurposed to hold the games. Before this, they were just getting filled with toys and dirty socks. This is configuration is MUCH better, and it is one less piece of furniture in a high-traffic area.

 

So here is about 80% of the games. Ziploc bags hold most of it, and plastic Gerber baby food containers (I saved a jillion of them, and they are an awesome size for smallish things) hold things like dice, gems and playing pieces. It is also nice that most game boards now fold down into fourths, instead of just in half.

 

The rest of it went into the Hall Closet of Doom, which is just adjacent to the dining room. There was just enough space to jam the rest of the stuff (including the games that I couldn't stand to 'debox')' and the over-sized things like the Blokus game boards and so forth. And, most importantly, the most problematic games that Colin liked to get into the most.

 

This is the lower half of that closet. Last year I moved all of my cookbooks out of the kitchen because I needed upper cabinet space to move the arts and crafts supplies into because, you guessed it, Colin kept getting into them. So this was my solution for that. The white drawer bins hold a couple more of the over-sized game things.

 

One last thing - thanks to a tip on Pinterest, this is what you can do with all of those game instructions. Grab a bunch of page protectors (I had a ton left over from my college days) and stick a set of game instructions in each one, and file them away in a binder. So now the games binder resides on one of the cookbook shelves as well. And no, it is not categorized in any way, shape, or form. What do you think I am? Anal?



So, did it work? Has Colin left things alone? Yes, with the exception of one item - the Bananagrams letter tiles. They are (were) in a small wicker basket (see the bookcase picture) that holds our most-often used games. I think I found them all... I guess I had better go check the floor vents.

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